


lady fate contemplating disaster, but she ain't the boss of me

by catefrankie



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, F/M, Minor Caroline Forbes/Stefan Salvatore, Salvatore Brother Angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:01:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 27,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26669389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catefrankie/pseuds/catefrankie
Summary: Elena is entering her sixth year at Hogwarts, with a mystery weighing on her that none of her friends know about.  For help, she turns to Damon, who, much to his brother’s chagrin, is finally back to finish his seventh year after mysteriously dropping out.  Can Elena harmlessly break a few rules and keep a few secrets?  Or is everything going to change?a full-cast Vampire Diaries Delena Hogwarts AU - because I think right now we'd all like to be living in a magical castle with our friend group, staying up late and going on trips to the village and sleeping in each other's dorms.
Relationships: Elena Gilbert/Damon Salvatore
Comments: 12
Kudos: 31





	1. I didn't know I was lonely 'til I saw your face

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please throw out in your mind the boring shirt/tie/graduation-gown aesthetic the HP films gave us. Find peace in the truth that basically everyone in the wizarding world is wearing dresses at all times. Glory in the boundlessness of imagination. Be free.

A chocolate frog sails out of a compartment and across the narrow corridor of the Hogwarts Express, traveling speedily enough that somebody must have thrown it with some force rather than just lost track of it, and Elena sighs and wishes she’d put on her prefect’s badge before she boarded the train. It might have given her some semblance of authority. She stops in the doorway and says, “I saw that, Alfie.” 

“Aww,” whines the scrawny third-year, “come on, Gilbert! The school year hasn’t even started yet, so you _can’t_ take any points away from me. Might as well leave me alone.”

She crosses her arms. “Knock it off, or I’ll just take the points as soon as we get to school – and don’t think you can hide and I’ll forget. I have a long memory.”

He throws his hands in the air. “Fine!”

She nods. “Fine.” She gives Alfie’s companions a warning look and heads back down the corridor. She doesn’t _regret_ taking the prefect position, exactly – it will look good, later, when she needs to get a job, and the money off tuition is essential – but sometimes it is a little tiresome having to keep an eye on what is effectively a few hundred additional Jeremies.

Spirits are high all over, but thankfully most students are finding it in themselves not to throw food or hex each other. Several people call to her as she passes their compartments, and she waves back without stopping. Jeremy comes tearing out of a door and nearly knocks her over, but she only gets half a scolding out before he takes off laughing in the opposite direction with Anna trailing after him, calling apologies. 

Elena finds the compartment she’s looking for at the back of the train: there are so many people, so many pets, and so much luggage crammed in that every surface is serving multiple purposes – feet up on trunks and legs stretched across other people’s laps, robes and scarves in various colors shoved into every available corner. It almost looks like everyone and everything will come spilling out if the door were to open. She shoulders it open anyway, and in fact, two things do spill out: Bonnie first, springing up from her seat and tackling Elena in a hug that knocks her back into the corridor, and then Caroline not far behind, wrapping her arms around both of them because she’s too impatient to wait her turn. Elena laughs and clings to them. 

“You _finally_ made it!” Caroline is crowing. She releases them and lets out a dramatic sigh. “God, it was such a long summer without you guys!”

“It really was,” Elena says.

“Ready for sixth year?” Bonnie asks, grinning.

Elena lifts her arms in an expansive shrug. “I guess I will be.”

“It’s going to be the _best_ year yet, Elena,” Caroline says, “I’m _sure_ of it. We’re going to be brilliant, and we’re going to be happy.”

As prophecies go, it’s a thoroughly un-magical one, but there is a kind of power in Caroline’s optimism. “You know,” Elena says, “I could do with a little brilliant happiness.”

Caroline bounces on the balls of her feet, beaming, and then flings her arms back around Elena. Bonnie laughs, and pries them apart so she can push them both through the door, where they are received with a chorus of “Elena!”s and “hey”s. Matt stands up and reaches around a stack of trunks to give the newcomer a hug. “How are you?”

“Good,” Elena says, smiling up into his familiar face. “You?” He nods. 

Tyler’s sitting up in the luggage rack, but he waves at her. “I ran into your brother earlier. He will _not_ stop snogging that girl.”

“I know.” Elena heaves her trunk onto the pile and leans around it to wave at the two students crammed into the back. 

“Hey, Elena!”

“Hey, Lexi.”

“Good summer?”

“Alright. Glad to be back.”

“Always,” Lexi agrees. “Here, why don’t you take my seat?”

Elena waves her off. “No, that’s fine. You stay.”

“No, really, it’s okay! I was going to go find Lee anyway. I think he’s in a compartment somewhere with all his Ravenclaw buddies.” Lexi stands with a practiced flip of her long blond hair, and raises her eyebrows at Elena. “It’s probably _very_ boring there without me.”

“You’re going to leave all your stuff here cluttering up our space?” Stefan complains.

“Yes,” Lexi tells him. She squeezes through the detritus gracefully, blows them all a kiss at the door, and saunters down the corridor. 

Elena takes the vacated seat at the window across from Stefan, Bonnie sits next to her, and Caroline squeezes in between Stefan and a couple of unwieldy owl cages. Stefan promptly turns sideways, kicks his feet up along the wall, and lies back to put his head in her lap. Elena doesn’t school her expression quickly enough, and Caroline says defensively, “What?”

Elena shakes her head, fighting a smile. “Nothing.”

“We’re taking advantage of the vertical space,” Stefan says.

Elena laughs. “I said nothing!” Caroline’s cheeks turn pink, and Elena shoots a furtive sideways glance at Bonnie, who shrugs. Stefan stayed with Caroline and her mom over the summer, and it looks like they’re more closely bonded than ever. 

“Oh my gosh, Elena,” Caroline exclaims. “Your O.W.L.’s! How’d they turn out?”

“Passed all nine.” The group sends up a small, albeit earnest, cheer, and she laughs. “Three O’s, four E’s, and two A’s.”

“Elena Gilbert got two A’s?” Tyler teases.

“Care of Magical Creatures and Divination,” she admits. “But I wasn’t planning to continue with them anyway.”

Bonnie puts at arm around her shoulders and squeezes. “Thanks for sticking it out with me and Gran in Divination all these years.”

“I’ll miss you,” Elena tells her, and drops her head onto her friend’s shoulder. “You got an O in that, of course. What else?”

“One more O, six E’s, and one A, in History of Magic. I’m dropping that and Herbology.”

“Bravo,” Elena says warmly. “Car?”

“Nine as well!” Caroline squeals. “So we’ll all have N.E.W.T. level Charms, Defense Against the Dark Arts, Potions, and Transfiguration together!”

“I’m dropping Potions,” Matt puts in.

“So the _girls_ will all be together,” Caroline retorts. Elena notes that she hasn't mention her specific grades, which probably means she got all O’s.

“What about you, Stefan?” Elena asks. “Are you going to be ready for N.E.W.T.’s at the end of the year?”

He shrugs. “If I pass some then that’s great, but I don’t really see myself worrying too much about another set of exams when this is the _last_ year I’ll have at Hogwarts. I want to be around for it.”

“That’s the spirit,” Tyler says, shooting a rubber band from his perch which hits Stefan in the foot and then falls to the ground. Somewhere under a bench, Bonnie’s cat meows pitifully, probably angry that she’s in a carrier and can’t chase it. 

“Are you going to make me constantly take points away from my own house this year?” Elena asks Tyler drily.

“You could always turn a blind eye,” Tyler says cheerfully. Elena rolls her eyes.

Matt slaps his hands on his knees. “Right,” he says. “Exploding snap?” 

“I’ll play,” Bonnie says, so Elena extricates herself from her friend. Tyler jumps down from the luggage rack and sits on the floor, and Matt starts to deal out the cards. Elena digs in her bag for a book, and, when none of them appeal, pulls out her journal. Caroline and Stefan’s murmuring, the noises of the game, and subsequent yelps from cat, owls, and unsuspecting players all fade into the background while she writes her first entry for the new school year.

_I hope I can live up to everyone’s expectations._

_I hope I make mom and dad proud._

_I hope our last year with Stefan and Lexi is amazing._

_I hope all of us stay friends, even after they graduate._

_I hope I get some answers._

_I hope I find what I’m looking for._

She looks up when there’s a knock on the compartment door, and sees a stranger there, but not a first-year. She glances around, intending to ask if anyone knows if they have a new teacher this year, and then she sees that Stefan is getting to his feet, with a look in his eyes that she’s never seen before. She looks back at the newcomer as he slides open the door. He’s in muggle clothes, inhabiting them with no sign of the self-consciousness that you sometimes see with wizards; he looks like he could possibly have been born in worn jeans and a leather jacket. He crosses one leg over the other, rests his black cowboy boot on its toe, and leans against the doorframe.

Stefan stops just in front of him, blocking him from stepping into the compartment, and says, “Damon.”

Damon bestows a lazy glance around the room and smirks, evidently quite pleased with the reaction he’s evoked. And then his eyes land on Stefan, and he says in a voice that means trouble, “Hello, brother.”

“What are you doing here?” Stefan asks.

“Well, I couldn’t miss the last-first day of school,” Damon drawls. “Your hair’s different. I like it.” 

“It’s been _four years_ , Damon,” Stefan says. 

“Yeah? Time sure flies.”

“I think I can handle Hogwarts without you.”

Damon laughs. “Oh yeah, I guess it is yours, too, isn’t it? But no, I meant my, _my_ last-first day of school.” 

Stefan scoffs. “Yeah, because all of a sudden you need to finish your education?”

“Education creates opportunities, Stef,” Damon says, too occupied with looking at something on the ceiling to even return Stefan’s angry glare.

“I don’t believe it,” Stefan says, “you’re not _actually_ staying. You’re up to something.” 

“Believe what you want.”

“Why can’t you just go somewhere else, anywhere else?”

Damon shrugs. “I miss my little brother.”

“You’re _lying_ ,” Stefan snaps. “Whatever it is, I want you out of here. Just leave me alone!”

“Sorry, no can do, Stefan,” Damon says calmly.

Before Stefan can retort, Alaric appears next to him in the doorway, looking like he may have just woken up. “I heard raised voices,” he says, giving the clearly-incensed Stefan a wary look. “Everything okay in here?”

Damon’s studied casual demeanor doesn’t change; Stefan is trembling with fury, probably right on the edge of reaching for his wand. Elena ducks out of her corner seat and clears her throat; Alaric looks back at her and Caroline snaps out of her shock enough to jump up and stand behind Stefan, a hand on his arm. “Everything’s fine, Rick,” Elena says.

Alaric sighs. “You can’t call me Rick during the school year, Elena.”

“Right,” she says. “Sorry, Professor.” 

He looks sideways, says, “Damon. I didn’t know you were taking the train.”

“Old time’s sake, Rick.” Damon’s voice is still absent, but Elena finds to her shock that his eyes are locked on her, as if everything else in the coach has been vanished. His head cocks, and a slow smile takes over his face, but it’s not a smile at her expense – it feels like it’s somewhere between recognition and invitation, like it’s telling her, _I don’t know you, but I know that I want to._ Her heart nervously thumps in her chest and she feels her face heating up.

Alaric says mournfully, “Are all my books still under there somewhere?”, and Elena pulls herself together to look back at the authority figure – who, she notes, did _not_ scold Damon for using his first name.

“Yeah, sorry, Professor,” Matt says. “We can help you carry all of it.”

“No, that’s okay, Matt,” Alaric answers. “Just as long as it’s dug out from under all the…owls.” He looks back and forth between Damon and Stefan; Damon raises his eyebrows at him, and Caroline tugs on Stefan’s arm until he gives the professor a tight smile. Alaric drags a hand down his face, and then through his hair. “Make sure you’re all in your uniforms by the time the train arrives, yes?”

They all nod obediently. Tyler and Matt mutter, “Yes, sir.”

Alaric gives the brothers one last look, and then walks off shaking his head. Damon graces the gathered group with one last smirk. “See you at the feast,” he says. He bobs his eyebrows once at Stefan, shoves his hands in his pockets, and swaggers down the hallway.

There’s a breathless pause, and then Stefan takes Caroline’s hand and squeezes it. “I’ll be right back.” 

Before Caroline can voice more of a protest than, “Stefan –”, he’s gone.

Tyler and Matt exchange glances, and Bonnie takes Caroline’s hand.

“Who was that?” Elena asks, shakily.

They all turn on her, identical expressions of incredulity on their faces. “You _dated_ Stefan,” Tyler says, “how do you not know? That’s Damon Salvatore.”

“He was in sixth year when we were in first,” Bonnie says.

Caroline adds, “And then he _dropped out_.”

They look back out the door, and Matt voices the thought that’s no doubt in all of their minds: “Who’d drop out of Hogwarts?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes: another multi-chapter WIP. The original conceit of this story was "nothing out of my wheelhouse, nothing difficult to plot out, just a few thousand words of fun banter and flirting". And then, of course, I added a loose overarching plot, some brother angst, a side couple arc, a minor villain, and a whole bunch of different locations. Eight out of eleven chapters are drafted, and will hopefully be posted weekly. 
> 
> Chapter title from “I Wanna Get Better” by The Bleachers.  
> Work title from “No Way”, from A Very Potter Sequel, because I couldn’t help myself.
> 
> Please consider leaving a comment! It can be pretty lonely work writing fic for a comatose fandom, so if you're reading it, I'd love to hear from you.


	2. do you know you’re unlike any other?

It’s almost two weeks before Elena sees Damon Salvatore again.

Despite his slightly ominous words, he must keep his head down during the feast, because she can’t find him when she scans the Great Hall. In the days that follow, she never catches his eye both reaching for the same scone at breakfast; she doesn’t pass him in the halls between classes. Once, she thinks she recognizes him walking across the courtyard below her when she’s up in the owlery – a single tiny figure in dark leather and trousers surrounded by the whirl of colored robes – but then she loses him again.

Stefan is in a sour mood; his brother's disappearing act has done nothing to reassure him, in fact, it seems he’d be happier if Damon were straightforwardly antagonizing him, as if it’s the anticipation of some plot worse than his imaginings that is driving him to brood. But Lexi can startle a smile out of him, and Caroline can get him to laugh at himself, and he does have quidditch to keep himself occupied. 

Everyone’s been busy, actually. With each of them specializing for the N.E.W.T.’s, all the class schedules are different and contradictory and strange. The girls do have their four classes together, but their free periods don’t line up, and Caroline has quidditch practices, Elena has prefect duties, and Bonnie’s Gran has been letting her help on bigger and bigger spells. They enchant notes for each other which appear in snatched moments when professors aren’t looking, they have late dinners where they go over their days at length and in detail. But Elena does miss the way things used to be, particularly when she’s sitting at a table in the library all by herself with all her upper-level textbooks surrounding her like a siege wall. She has a debate coming up in Muggle Studies, on the twentieth century ethical controversy of using healing spells exclusively for witches and wizards. The topic is one Elena has strong opinions about, but moreover Aimee Bradley is on the ‘pro’ side, and losing to her would be miserable.

She’s carefully noting down the text of a seventeenth century law which would provide precedent for her ‘contra’ argument, when somebody drops a stack of books onto her table with a loud _thwack_. She looks up, expecting one of the boys, or maybe Bonnie or Caroline if Astronomy got out early, but it’s Damon. He’s still in Muggle clothes, albeit slightly less flashy ones. He grins at her, and collapses dramatically into the chair across from hers.

Elena says in an undertone, “What are you doing?”

“It’s the library,” he whispers. “I’m _studying_.”

She thinks about telling him that he could study at any of the many empty tables – it’s the second week of classes, only the advanced students have much homework yet – but he widens his eyes in exaggerated innocence and opens the book on the top of his stack, and she decides it wouldn’t be worth the effort to evict him. If he starts making a nuisance of himself, she can always deduct a bunch of points until he goes away…points from _whichever_ house he’s affiliated with; it’s impossible to tell, since she’s never seen him in uniform. She gives him a warning look and returns to her research; to her surprise, he does the same.

She finishes her notecard and shuts her book. Across from her, Damon flips through the last few pages of his volume, closes it with a _thump_ , and sets it aside. She opens the next book in her pile – written by a twentieth century healer, on the ‘pro’ side; she heard Aimee Bradley crowing about it at yesterday’s Potions class – and Damon flips open one of his with a flourish. She looks up and fixes him with a glare.

“What?” he says. “The last one was useless. Can I borrow a quill?”

“Do you need to borrow parchment as well or are you planning to write in the book?” she says, sarcastically.

“Well, I _was_ going to write in the book, but I wouldn’t say no to some parchment.”

She rolls her eyes, but digs in her bag for the requisite supplies. “Now hush,” she tells him. 

Aimee Bradley’s dreadful book is extremely dry. It could be because Elena hates the argument so much that reading pages and pages of it feels impossible. Or maybe it would just be easier to focus if Damon wasn't flipping his wand across his knuckles while he reads. It’s giving off intermittent sparks, and Damon hums any time he finds something interesting, which is often enough that it’s extremely annoying, but not so often that she doesn’t occasionally delude herself into thinking he’s stopped. After one particularly loud “ _Huh_!”, Elena slides down in her chair and kicks him in the ankle.

He looks up, aggrieved. “Hey!”

“Don’t give me that, you’re being intentionally distracting.”

“I’m intentionally trying to _read_ , and you _kicked_ me!” he answers, but he looks half-delighted. 

“Mr. Salvatore,” the librarian calls sharply. “Do I need to remind you of library rules?”

He twists in his seat, waves at her, and sings out, “No, Madame Fell!” It echoes. A few heads pop out of the shelves to stare at him, and Elena resists the urge to hide her face in a book. 

The librarian shoos the rubbernecking students back where they came from and, with an angry swish of her robes, comes stalking over. Damon turns back to the table in time to flick his wand and mutter a few words, and Elena watches his books shift from the yellowed paper bound in faded leather he has been reading, into the more brightly colored, uniformly-sized textbooks that tend to be assigned in class. Even the text in the open book shudders and changes. 

Which can only mean he’s not supposed to have those books.

Elena looks up, startled, and meets his steady and oh-so-serious gaze for a split second before Madame Fell comes up next to him, her arms crossed and toe tapping, and he turns to her with a charming grin.

“You may have been gone for some time, Mr. Salvatore,” the librarian says in a steely voice, “but I’m sure you remember that libraries are meant to be areas for _quiet_ study, _not_ yodeling and flinging sparks everywhere and causing a scene.”

“Of course, ma’am, I apologize,” he says. “I will save my yodeling for elsewhere.”

“And the stacks have shifted some since you were here last, so don’t go putting things back in all the wrong places.”

“I haven’t had much of a chance to explore, yet,” he says. “If I need help finding anything, I’ll be sure to ask.”

She thaws slightly, and looks down at his books. “Second-year charms is a little below your level, isn’t it, Mr. Salvatore?”

He blinks, angelically. “Tutoring.” 

Madame Fell raises her eyebrows, then glances at Elena. Damon’s eyes find hers, but not like he’s begging her to cover for him. No, it’s a kind of curiosity, like the one she saw in his eyes on the train: he’s waiting to see what she’ll do, not for himself, but just to _see_. His eyes are blue, she realizes, but not blue like a forget-me-not, blue like ice, or seafoam, pale and piercing.

She looks up at Madame Fell, and smiles reassuringly, hardly knowing what she’s communicating – _it’s fine, I can handle him_ , or _thanks for intervening, everything’s okay now_. The librarian looks back and forth between them, _tsk_ s, and walks briskly back toward her desk. Damon picks up his second-year charms book and flips through it idly, keeping an eye out to make sure Madame Fell is occupied before he waves his wand so that it and its fellows revert to their original appearance; Elena ducks her head and resumes reading.

After only a few minutes Damon nudges her with his foot. 

She rolls her eyes, but looks up. “What?”

“You’re one of my brother’s friends, right?”

She raises her eyebrows, and answers pointedly, “I’m Elena.”

“Elena,” he repeats.

She doesn’t bother pretending she doesn’t know who he is, so instead she returns to her book and starts copying down the first line that catches her eye.

“So,” he says, “ _Elena_. What kind of Gryffindor are you?”

She continues her careful note-taking - even though the line she chose is absolutely uninspiring - and doesn’t look at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Well, I can’t quite figure you out.”

“That’s not entirely surprising,” she says drily, “given that you don’t know me at all.”

“No, that’s not it,” he says. 

Against her better judgment, she glances up. He’s leaning back in his chair, but his expression is anything but casual. He’s looking at her – _really_ looking, like if he stares long enough he can see through her, find the answer to some mystery behind her eyes that maybe she doesn’t even know is there. She blinks.

“So, Gryffindor,” he repeats. “Righteous, like my brother, or…”, he raises his eyebrows, “a thrill-seeker.”

_Like my brother_ , Elena thinks, rueful. Out loud, she says, “I don’t know, Damon, I just happen to be in Gryffindor. It doesn’t have to mean anything particularly deep.”

“Yeah, I noticed the whole,” he gestures vaguely, “ _inter-house solidarity_ thing your little group has going on.”

Elena bristles. “I just think you can’t tell everything about a person by what house they’re in.” 

“No, of course not,” Damon agrees readily. “That’s why you have to narrow it down. As previously stated, Gryffindors are holier-than-thou moralists _and_ adrenaline junkies-slash-jocks.”

Elena presses her lips together and tries to look disapproving. Aimee Bradley _is_ a bit holier-than-thou. Lexi can be an adrenaline junkie. Tyler is definitely a jock.

“Slytherins,” Damon goes on, “obviously, are either members of some personality-erasing cult, or they’re on an individual power trip – you know, muggle-borns with chips on their shoulders, like the blonde that’s always hanging around Stefan.”

Elena has lovingly called Caroline a power-hungry maniac too many times to counter that, so she just says, “Caroline’s one of my best friends, Damon.”

“Oh, no disrespect. I’m very aware that I probably have her perky, positive influence to thank for Stefan having not set me on fire yet.”

She still doesn’t know _why_ Stefan would want to set him on fire, what the root of their antipathy is – but she doesn’t think she wants to ask now, before she’s heard Stefan’s side of it. She taps one fingernail on the table and shoots a meaningful look at Damon’s collection of contraband literature. “And Ravenclaws? What’s your theory on them?”

“Pssh, I don’t know,” he says dismissively. “How am I supposed to observe them when they’re always shut up in the library, reading rare books and muttering to themselves?”

“ _You’re_ shut up in the library reading rare books and muttering to yourself.”

“No, I’m muttering to _you_ ,” he says. “Therein lies the essential difference which excludes me from membership in Ravenclaw.”

She rolls her eyes, but she can’t quite fight a smile. “Hufflepuffs?”

He scoffs. “Well, there’s the rare few genuine hard workers, like your friend Matt, but the rest of them…”

“Let me guess,” Elena interrupts. When he raises his eyebrows and gestures for her to continue, she settles theatrically back in her chair and gives him a pointed once-over, mirroring his penetrating stare to the best of her ability. “Hard workers, and the people who _don’t_ work hard, _don’t_ care about their studies, are too lazy to be power-hungry, and would rather wiggle out of hard situations than face them?” She crosses her arms.

Damon laughs. “Ah, the old ‘unsortable’ theory – Helga Hufflepuff, she’ll take the rest? You could put it that way.”

“How would you put it?”

He shrugs, then leans toward her and says conspiratorially, “Well, most Hufflepuffs aren’t that bright.”

She snorts. “So, you’re one of the _stupid_ ones.” 

“Obviously,” Damon says, smirking. “Haven’t you heard anything about me at all?” 

She hasn't. “Well, you can’t believe everything you hear.”

He snorts. “Sure you can.” He points his wand at her idly, says, “So, Elena, what about you? You’ve got your pretty crimson-lined robes with your prefect badge pinned just _so_ , you’ve been in the library for hours so you’re clearly the perfect student, and you’re beloved by every authority figure in the castle – _but_ , now you’ve lied to _two_ of them, on behalf of little old me.”

Elena tilts her head. Perhaps when she was sorted she was a bravery-and-adventure Gryffindor – she did plenty of rule-breaking with Bonnie and Caroline for those first few years, got plenty of detentions and lost plenty of points. But lately she finds herself playing the role of the one who acts responsibly, just because somebody has to – which doesn’t sound very Gryffindor at all. “I didn’t lie to anyone,” she says. “And even if I did, what makes you think it was for you?”

“I _know_ it was,” he says, smugly. “So. What kind of Gryffindor are you? Goodie-two-shoes or wild child? Buzzkill or rebel?

Elena can’t help it, she grins. “Would you like a hint?”

“I would _love_ a hint.”

She pushes her chair back, stands, places both hands on the table, and leans forward. Looking amused, Damon leans in himself, so that their faces are barely a hand’s breadth apart. “Damon,” Elena whispers, “I am…taking five points from Hufflepuff.”

He lets out a startled laugh. “ _Five_ points?” he asks, as she straightens and begins packing up her books. “Five points, for stealing books from the restricted section and then engaging in school-prohibited wandwork to cover it up?”

“No,” Elena says, shouldering her bag. She smiles, and raises her eyebrows. “For talking in the library.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An anticipatory apology to Aimee Bradley: I needed a villain for this piece, and it had to be someone significantly less threatening than Katherine or Rebekah. Aimee is one of the few side characters who stands out to me, by virtue of being recognizable as Vicky from The Good Place, so she got a bitchy makeover.
> 
> And a caveat: the characters' statements on the nature of Hogwarts houses are not representative of the author's views. =P
> 
> Chapter title from "Thunder" by Boys Like Girls.


	3. got a closet filled up to the brim with the ghosts of my past

“I think I _finally_ have the lowdown on Stefan’s brother,” Caroline announces.

It’s early Saturday morning, and the three girls are sitting wrapped in blankets on the top of the astronomy tower. It’s an old tradition of theirs, one in which they’ve consistently refused to let any of the boys participate: once a month, they drag themselves out of their respective common rooms before anyone else is awake and spend an hour or two watching the sun rise. It’s actually a lot more fun now that their combined repertoire of spells has expanded; they can enchant little fires to sit around and cast heating spells on their blankets, whereas when they were younger they just wore layers and shivered and insisted stubbornly that it was worth it. It’s more necessary, too, now that checking up on each other has to be done rather more intentionally than casually.

“Oh god, can’t we talk about anything else?” Bonnie complains. “He’s all anyone’s wanted to gossip about since he got here, and he’s not even that interesting.”

“It doesn’t _matter_ if he’s interesting or not,” Caroline retorts, “because he is Stefan’s brother, and as Stefan’s friends, we have to understand what _he’s_ going through, so we can support him.”

“So you got all this information from him? Elena asks, digging her wand out of the tangle of her blanket. She points it at her hot chocolate, says, “ _Caminus_ ,” and then waits until it starts to steam again; Bonnie holds out her mug and Elena does hers too. 

“We discussed it, yes,” Caroline says, primly. “And I _may_ have gotten some of the details from Lexi, and verified certain elements with professors.”

“So when you say you and Stefan discussed it, you mean you got _all_ the details from Lexi and then forced him to have a conversation about it,” Bonnie says. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Are you really sure Stefan wants this stuff to be common knowledge?” Elena says uneasily.

“Well, obviously I’m not screaming about it in the Great Hall!” Caroline says. “I’m _just_ telling you guys.” She raises her eyebrows at them until Bonnie impatiently waves her on. “So, as you know, Damon was in his sixth year when we were first-years and Stefan was a second-year, and then he didn’t come back for his seventh year.”

“Which makes him…twenty-one,” Bonnie says.

“ _And_ which left Stefan basically alone,” Caroline says, shooting Bonnie a glare, “since their parents had already passed. He had to stay at the castle all through the school year and live with a weird uncle during the summers.”

“Poor Stefan,” Bonnie says obediently.

“ _But_ it turns out that that wasn’t when Damon dropped out,” Caroline says. “He actually was offered a really prestigious cursebreaking internship and got permission to take a year off school.” 

“The professors must have _seriously_ liked him to let him do that,” Bonnie says.

“Yeah, apparently he was some kind of genius at deciphering the components of other people’s spells,” Caroline says, making a face, “whatever.”

“That’s very generous of you to say,” Elena teases.

Caroline dunks her finger in her mug and flicks whipped cream at her. “I looked up his student records and my grades are totally better than his.”

“Stay on topic, Car,” Bonnie says. “So he’s a cursebreaking prodigy and he leaves school for the glory of ungainful employment.”

“Right, but what happened was, he didn’t even stick it out with the cursebreakers for the whole year. He did what he was told for seven months, and then once he’d learned what he wanted to, he took off – stole some materials, hopped a train, and tried to lift some curse on an ex-girlfriend of his.”

“ _What_?” Bonnie says.

“I _know_ ,” Caroline says. “How sordid is that?”

Elena shifts uncomfortably. “What kind of curse was she under?” 

“Literally trapped undying in a tomb, I think? I heard that it took four witches to seal the thing, and Damon showed up and tried to break it single-handed.”

“And failed, of course,” Bonnie says, dismissively.

“ _No_ , that’s the thing, he succeeded,” Caroline says. “And _she wasn’t even there_. Apparently she was off somewhere abroad the whole time, perfectly fine. She knew he was looking for ways to lift the curse and she just kept on ignoring him.”

Bonnie whistles. Elena’s brow furrows. She can’t quite keep the sympathy out of her voice when she says, “So he threw away his whole life to help her, for nothing?” 

“That’s his own fault,” Caroline says. “The word is the school would actually have taken him back, even after he skipped out on the internship. He was supposed to finish his seventh year when we were in third and Stefan was in fourth, but he went on some kind of massive bender and never showed up.”

“Oh my god,” Elena blurts out, “that’s the year Stefan and I dated.” 

Caroline smacks herself in the forehead. “Come _on_ , Elena, _how_ do you not already know any of this? Didn’t Stefan ever talk about it?” 

“I don’t know,” Elena says, shrugging awkwardly. “Stefan and I didn’t really, uh, _face_ stuff like you two do.”

“Yeah, you guys were kind of avoidance central,” Bonnie puts in. Elena elbows her, and Bonnie says quickly, “No, I mean, you were young, and you were both dealing with a lot. It was probably good that you had each other for some healthy escapism.”

“And it’s good that he’s best friends with Caroline now and not me,” Elena says, toasting Caroline.

Caroline rolls her eyes, but she’s blushing. “Thanks for your unnecessary endorsement, Elena. At any rate, Damon disappeared for four years. As far as anybody can figure he was living in the Muggle world, probably stealing and breaking the International Statute and drinking Muggle whiskey.”

“For four years?” Bonnie says.

“But he’s back now,” Elena says slowly. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Caroline says. “Nobody seems to see him ever. He’s not in any of Stefan’s classes, thank god. The rumor is that all his seventh-year classes are independent studies and private research projects.”

“Whose house is he even in?” Bonnie asks.

“Matt’s,” Elena answers absently.

Caroline’s head snaps around. “How do you know?”

“He told me.”

“What? Why didn’t he tell me?” Caroline says, pouting.

“No, Matt didn’t tell me,” Elena says, “Damon told me.”

Caroline’s eyebrows fly up her face. “Um, _when_ did you talk to _Damon_?”

“The other day, in the library, when you were in Astronomy.”

“And you’ve been sitting on that information all this time?”

“Well I didn’t know we were gathering intelligence,” Elena says reasonably. “And all I found out is what house he’s in, you’re seriously telling me that wasn’t in his student records?”

“I was looking at his academics, I forgot!”

“What matters is we know now,” Bonnie interrupts, laughing. “He’s in Hufflepuff, which is absolutely essential knowledge for us to have, in order to support Stefan, as his friends.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Caroline gripes, “if he were in Gryffindor with Stefan and Elena or Slytherin with us it would have mattered.”

“He doesn’t seem like a Hufflepuff, though,” Elena says musingly. “He doesn’t _look_ it. He looks more like a –”

“Ah ah ah,” Caroline says, warningly, flipping her emerald scarf around her shoulders. “That’s stereotyping.”

“Yeah,” Bonnie agrees, “Just because he’s a school-dropout bad boy with a probable drinking problem that doesn’t mean he’s a Slytherin. Anybody who’d do something so self-destructive for someone who didn’t give a crap about him couldn’t hack it in Slytherin.”

Elena hums, non-committal. “So how’s Stefan doing with him being back, given…everything?”

Caroline sighs. “Well, they aren’t talking. They aren’t _really_ talking, anyway. Sometimes Damon comes up and says something clever and annoying, and then Stefan says _tell me what you’re doing here_ and Damon says _going to school_ and Stefan gets angry and stalks off. I think they might just continue like that until they both die, or graduate, whatever happens first.”

“Do you think he could be telling the truth?” Elena asks tentatively. “That he is just back to finish school?”

Caroline’s expression darkens. “Even if that’s true,” she says, “he still didn’t come back for Stefan.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I needed a spell for Elena to reheat her hot chocolate, so I came up with "caminus"...which is Latin for "stove". I'm putting that here in the author's note because it's one of my favorite jokes in the whole story.
> 
> Chapter title from "Hero/Heroine" by Boys Like Girls.
> 
> Thanks for reading! If you're liking it, please consider leaving a comment!


	4. nobody wants to stay home while the rest of us go out and make a day of it

The first Hogsmeade weekend comes around, and Caroline’s breakfast-time war council to determine which shops they’ll visit in which strategic order hits a small snag when it becomes clear that neither Elena nor Stefan intends to leave the castle. 

“One Gryffindor prefect has to stay behind just in case the first and second-years need anything,” Elena says, buttering a muffin with no outward sign of regret. “I volunteered.”

“ _Why_?” Tyler says around a mouthful of porridge. 

“Because somebody has to do it, and most of the first-years are scared of Aimee Bradley,” Elena says, matter-of-fact, “so it wouldn’t be fair to them if I left. I really don’t mind. If somebody will just bring me back some sweets from Honeyduke’s, I’ll be perfectly content.”

“Anything in particular?” Matt asks.

“Nothing weird flavored. Sugar mice and jelly slugs? Whatever looks good.”

“Stefan?” Caroline says. 

Elena glances down the table. Stefan sets his jaw, and says flatly, “I’m not interested in running into my brother.”

“ _Stefan_ ,” Caroline says again. 

“You don’t even know if he’s going,” Bonnie says reasonably.

Stefan laughs darkly. “An opportunity to get out of the castle, hit on women, and drink? Trust me, he’ll be there.”

“So we’ll avoid him!” Caroline pleads. “Hogsmeade is bigger than the castle, and we almost never run into him here.”

“Sorry, Car,” Stefan says firmly, “maybe next month. But for this first one, I’m going to let him make an arse of himself when I’m not there to see it.”

“Hiding in your room to avoid confrontation isn’t exactly the Gryffindor approach,” Lexi says mildly.

But he remains resolute, vulnerable to neither cajoling nor shame, and so Caroline leaves him with strict instructions not to brood, and the promise that she’ll bring him back something fun and cheerful. Lexi leaves him with a smack upside the head, and the promise that she’s going to go drink firewhiskey without him, so he’s to blame for whatever decisions she makes afterward.

When they’ve all left, Stefan slides over the bench to sit next to Elena and grins at her kind of bashfully. “So, should we do something? Chess, or one-on-one quidditch, or something?” 

“I can’t,” Elena tells him, apologetic. “I have research to do, and I’d like to do it while the library is quiet.”

Stefan nods. “Sure, no problem.”

“Maybe we can all do something when they get back?”

“Yeah.”

He seems genuinely agreeable, but she can’t help asking, “Are you doing okay?”

He shrugs. “He’s going to be around every corner, for the whole day. If I can avoid seeing him by staying here, a missed butterbeer or two is a small price to pay.”

“Do you not want to get used to him being here?” 

He lets out a short, self-deprecating laugh. “Hogwarts has always been Damon’s world – when I started here, he already knew every staircase and every corridor, he’d read every book and mastered every spell, and _everyone_ knew him. Most of the professors called me ‘Damon’s brother’ for a solid year and a half.” He looks up; she follows his gaze to the mostly empty Hufflepuff table. He admits, “I never _stopped_ being used to him being here.”

Elena bites her lip, but the words come spilling out anyway: “Then why don’t you try to talk to him?” 

“Elena…”

“No, I know,” she rushes to say. “It’s not that simple. But he’s still your brother, Stefan. You still care about him.”

Stefan sighs. “Yeah, he’s my brother. And I know my brother. There’s some reason he’s here, and once that reason runs out, he’s just going to leave again.”

“So are you,” Elena says softly. “This is your last year here – his, too.”

“So,” Stefan says heavily, “what’s the point?” 

She disagrees – feels in her _bones_ how this approach isn’t like Stefan, and isn’t going to make him happy – but she ducks her head and lets it go. “I’m sorry.” 

“Yeah.”

After a moment, she leans over and nudges him gently with her shoulder. Stefan looks at her sideways. “You’re about to offer to play pity-chess with me, aren’t you?”

“Not pity!” she says. “It’s just, I can make the time, if you want to?”

Stefan nudges her in return, his greater weight making her teeter away from him. “No, go to the library. I’ll go review quidditch plays, or something.”

“You probably should. Caroline’s been pretty intense about the Slytherin team since she got elected captain.”

He groans. “She’s going to beat all of us into the ground, anyway, it almost seems like a waste of time to make any effort.”

Elena tries one more time: “Have you talked to her about any of this?”

Stefan gives her a look that is deeply unimpressed. “As if any of us could avoid talking about issues that Caroline thinks we need help dealing with.”

“That is true,” she admits.

“But she’s an only child, and _you’re_ …” Stefan trails off, waving vaguely.

“What?” Elena says, not sure yet if she should be offended.

He makes an exaggerated face of disgust. “An _older_ sibling.”

Elena laughs. “What does that matter?”

“If there’s a problem, you can basically force Jeremy to deal with it your way. I don’t have that luxury.”

“You’re making me sound pretty dictatorial!” 

Stefan raises his eyebrows, says, “If the prefect badge fits.”

Elena laughs, and spins around to swing her legs off the bench. “I’ll see you later.” She points at Stefan, says warningly, “Don’t brood, or Caroline will know, and beat you in quidditch _harder_.” He chuckles; Elena grabs a couple of oranges from the middle of the table and jumps up. She drops the oranges in the pockets of her robes, and jogs off toward her common room.

She checks in on the students left in the dormitories, most of whom are transparently up to some mischief; they’re still too young and amateurish to come up with anything truly damaging or dangerous, though, so she leaves them to their plotting. She runs up to her room to fetch her journal and her history textbook, and then makes her meandering way to the library.

It is quiet; there are only a few scattered figures hunched over at tables, the usual Ravenclaws so deeply caught in an idea or a question that they haven’t realized it’s the weekend, let alone a Hogsmeade weekend. They won’t bother her. They probably won’t even notice her. 

She drops her bag at an empty table in a corner, puts up her hair, rolls up her sleeves, and takes a deep breath.

She starts in the reference section, pulling out all the different encyclopedias and carrying them back over to their table, where she scans through the table of contents and index of each one. Some she places in a pile, and others she taps with her wand, sending them floating over to be re-shelved. She opens her journal, notes the names of the rejected books, and marks down the referenced sections and pages of the books in the pile, then returns to the stacks. She pulls down almanacs of magical creatures next and repeats the process; none of them are placed in the still short pile on the table. She checks the indexes of collections of famous wizards’ writings, and then circles back for the complete, unabridged and unannotated works that came up in her search. She thumbs through the card catalog, and returns with a slim, solitary book.

She has barely more than half a dozen books when she sits down and begins to read. She takes diligent notes in her journal, and keeps a list of other texts she finds reference to. As she moves from entries in one encyclopedia to another, from author to author, the notes repeat themselves. She draws stars next to new information, and question marks next to material that contradicts what someone else wrote. There are more question marks than stars.

The clock in the clock tower strikes noon. Elena takes out an orange and slowly peels it in her lap, hunched over so that Madame Fell can’t see her. When she’s eaten it, she vanishes the peel, casts a basic household washing spell on her hands, and gets up to stretch her legs and look for the latest books in her bibliography. She finds only one of them.

After a brief internal debate, she approaches Madame Fell’s desk. “Excuse me?”

The librarian looks up. “Miss Gilbert. Shouldn’t you be out on the town, or the village, as the case may be?”

In answer, Elena taps her prefect pin. “Ma’am, would you be able to show me how to work the referencing spell? It’s just a twist on _accio_ , right?”

Madame Fell purses her lips. “I’m afraid we don’t allow students to use that spell. I can help you with anything you’re working on, though. What are you looking for references to?”

Elena hesitates, then answers, “Doppelgangers.”

Madame Fell flicks her wand at the giant tome in front of her and the pages fan across and then open, with a short section glowing a faint gold. She reads off the titles: “ _Ainsworth Encyclopedia_ , volume six, _Collingwood Magical Encyclopedia_ , volume three, _Eldridge Classics Collection_ , the second edition, _Merlin: A Guide for the Perplexed_ , _Pickering Encyclopedia for Young Wizards and Witches_ , _Happenings Occurrences and Phenomena: Not a Creature and Not a Spell_ , and _Scrivener’s Biology of Magic_.” She looks up at Elena. “Would you like me to summon them for you?”

“Just the _Happenings and Occurrences_ one, please,” Elena answers. “I already have the other ones.”

Madame Fell raises her eyebrows. “Then I suppose you are to be congratulated on your research methods.” She lifts her wand and waits, and after a drawn-out moment expertly snatches the whizzing book out of the air. She holds it out to Elena, says, “I’m afraid those are the only ones we have in the main collection.”

Elena takes the book. “In the main collection?” she repeats.

Madame Fell looks at her, and then, as if Elena hadn’t said anything, asks, “Is there anything else I can help you with, Miss Gilbert?”

“No, ma’am, thank you.”

“And give me that orange you have in your pocket, you know you’re not allowed to have that in here.”

“Yes, ma’am, sorry.”

Elena walks back to her corner table and sinks down into her chair, eyeing her assembled pile of unread research with slightly less hope and significantly less enthusiasm than she’d possessed that morning. She glances out the window, sighs, and starts in again where she left off.

She’s filled up three more pages with notes and written down the names of half a dozen more books which she suspects won’t be in the library’s main collection when a sweet-smelling paper bag tied up with ribbon is dropped on her journal, and she looks up to see Matt and Bonnie, looking cheerful, and Caroline, evidently seething about something.

“Sugar mice, peach drops, and one of those turnovers from the Three Broomsticks,” Matt announces proudly.

“Matt Donovan, you’re a gem,” Elena answers. She reaches for her bag, casually pulling her open history book on top of _Happenings Occurrences and Phenomena_ with her other hand as she does so, and digs out a handful of sickles. “For your trouble, kind sir.”

“Pleasure doing business with you,” he answers, pocketing them.

“So, how was Hogsmeade?”

“Fine, same as always,” Bonnie says.

“Did the third years behave themselves?”

“Gorged themselves on sweets and butterbeer. At least two boys spent _all_ their pocket money at Zonko’s.”

“And were you tripping over Damon Salvatore all day?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Caroline bursts out.

Elena raises her eyebrows. “Wait, seriously?”

“Oh my god, Elena, he was _everywhere_ ,” Caroline complains. “No matter where we turned, that’s where he was, smirking and throwing money around and casually using _all_ kinds of magic, because he’s of age and he _can_.” She blows out a breath, says, “I _hate_ that Stefan was right.”

Elena pulls a sympathetic face. “You don’t have to tell him he was.”

“No, he’ll find out, because this stupid school doesn’t have anything better to gossip about,” Caroline gripes.

“Come on, Car,” Matt says, “you have to admit some of the stuff he did was pretty insane. I mean, he just walked into Honeydukes and the girl who works there hopped right over the counter, walked up, and kissed him on the _lips_.” 

“No,” Bonnie corrects, “people must be getting that wrong, that was Bree, in the Three Broomsticks.”

“No, I saw the girl in Honeydukes. Rose, or whatever.”

Bonnie snorts a laugh. “Evidently they both kissed him, because I saw Bree.”

“He kissed _Bree_?” Elena says.

“He only came in to kiss her in the first place,” Caroline says, acidly, “because then he went over to the Hogs Head for some _sketchy_ meeting, and so he could drink firewhiskey without the professors seeing him.”

“To be fair, the meeting only looked sketchy because it was in the Hogs Head,” Bonnie says reasonably. “Everything that happens in there looks sketchy.”

“ _You’re_ just saying that because you thought the guy he was meeting was _hot_ ,” Caroline shoots back.

“He was hot,” Bonnie says. “Besides, four-year-long bender notwithstanding, I don’t really see how Damon’s that bad.”

“You’re only saying _that_ because you want him to introduce you to his hot friend!”

Bonnie grins. “Now there’s an idea.” 

Caroline lets out a frustrated scream.

Elena looks at her, lifts both hands to gesture to their surroundings, and says, “Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“Five points from Slytherin.”

“I don’t care.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If at this point you're thinking to yourself, _what, another chapter in the library?_ , I hear you. I think by the end of the fic I may find that I've spent more time talking about research and studying and magic homework than Rowling ever did in the whole series. Apparently you can take the girl outta grad school, but you can't take the grad school outta the girl.
> 
> Chapter title from "Chap Stick and Chapped Lips and Things Like Chemistry" by Relient K.
> 
> Thanks for reading! You may have noticed this chapter is a bit late, but unfortunately the story might go on a little bit of an additional hiatus, as I have a two-week stretch of substitute-teaching coming up and may not be able to do the necessary edits, and also because I would love if the obligatory Christmas-at-Hogwarts chapter lined up with actual Christmas. Leave me comments to comfort me in my absence!!


	5. acting like I don't see every ribbon you used to tie yourself to me

Gryffindor versus Hufflepuff quidditch matches are Elena’s favorites. Granted, she knows almost everyone on the Gryffindor team – Stefan’s team captain and the seeker, Jeremy’s keeper, Tyler’s a beater, and Lexi is one of the chasers – and on the Hufflepuff team she really only knows Matt, but Matt’s been leading the Hufflepuff team for years, so she always feels she can be happy no matter who wins. These also used to be the games that she, Bonnie, and Caroline could watch together, but now that Caroline’s captain, she’s sitting in the very front of the Slytherin stands and taking copious notes on both teams’ strategies. She’s even used her new absolute power over her team to force them all to sit with her, and assigned them all one player from each team to keep an eye on. Elena can just make out their little sullen faces from her seat in the Gryffindor stands. Careful not to take her hands out of her pockets so they don’t freeze, Elena elbows Bonnie, nods in their general direction, and says, “I’m _so_ glad we don’t play quidditch anymore.”

Bonnie laughs, and elbows her back. “I’m glad I quit in solidarity with you two years ago, so I didn’t have to quit this year to get out from under Caroline’s thumb.”

“Everything definitely worked out for the best,” Elena agrees comfortably. On the pitch, Jeremy makes a death-defying dive for the quaffle and saves it just before it sails through a goal; Elena whoops. When the cheering has died down, she says, “We missed you at dinner the last couple nights.”

“Yeah, sorry,” Bonnie says. “I wanted to be there, but Gran has me doing all this work trying to decipher some prophecy. The professors seem to think it’s urgent, and we can see a lot more when there’s two of us because of the whole bloodline thing.”

“How urgent?” Elena asks.

Bonnie rolls her eyes. “Urgent is a relative term when it comes to seers. Means ‘sometime this century’. I can’t exactly say no, since she’s my head of house on top of being family, but sometimes –”

Elena grabs her arm, cutting her off, and watches breathlessly as Matt swoops in and intercepts a pass from Lexi, and rockets down the pitch. He trades the quaffle back and forth with one of his chasers, feints a pass to their third, and then makes a perfect goal. Elena screams, dimly aware that Bonnie is laughing at her. Unbothered, she yells, “Go Matt!”, and Bonnie echoes her.

She hears a sweet, high-pitched voice behind her: “Oh, for _goodness_ sake, Elena.”

Elena presses her lips together and breathes out hard through her nose, but turns around. “Aimee?”

Aimee Bradley bares her teeth in a simpering smile. “It’s bad enough you have to cheer whenever anyone scores a point because you’ve dated _both_ team captains, but do you really always have to bring her into our stands? I can’t force you to like your house, but would it kill you to show a _tiny_ bit of loyalty on the days we have games?” 

“You’re really going to lecture me about house spirit when you didn’t bother to show up until now?” Elena says drily. “It’s the fourth quarter, Aimee. Do you even know who’s winning?” 

Bonnie snickers. Aimee draws herself up ramrod straight and says icily, “I was patrolling the corridors. Some of us take our prefect duties _seriously_.”

“Yeah, we know,” Bonnie says, “your life’s ambition is to make head girl.” 

“What?” Aimee says, bristling. “You think _Elena_ will?” 

Bonnie looks up at her and smiles, insincerely. “No, you’ve definitely got it in the bag, Bradley.”

Aimee, correctly, takes offense. “The only way Elena would _ever_ make head girl is nepotism because her slutty aunt is sleeping with Professor Saltzman,” she snaps, “ _or_ out of sheer sympathy because she’s an _orphan_.”

Elena jumps to her feet and lunges to grab Bonnie’s wrist before she can reach for her wand, and then a shadow falls over them both. Elena looks up just in time to see Damon holding his wand an inch away from Aimee’s nose, and then there’s a quick flash of light, and Aimee’s eyes go slightly unfocused. She blinks a couple times and looks at Damon like she doesn’t know what he’s doing there. 

“You were just leaving,” he tells her.

Aimee blinks again, and then slowly turns around and stumblingly makes her way toward the exit.

The moment ticks on; there’s a gasp from the crowd as something happens in the game behind them. Elena stares after her retreating rival, dimly aware that she’s still gripping Bonnie’s wrist and that her friend is shaking with what is likely suppressed laughter. She pulls her eyes away from Aimee and looks up at Damon, who is smiling at her blandly. “What did you do?!” 

Damon’s brow furrows, and he scoffs. “Relax, Elena, it’s not like I used the imperius curse or anything. I just confunded her.”

Offensive magic against another student. She can’t exactly just take points from him, but is she really going to turn him in to a professor? “You can’t just go around confunding people,” she says, shakily.

“I don’t see why not,” Damon says. “Weren’t you listening to her? She’s already out of touch with reality, confunding her will just reinforce her own stupidity – a victimless crime. Right now she’s probably convinced she left because she got the best of you in that exchange.”

Elena feels a smile pulling at her mouth, shakes her head, and says in as severe a voice as she can muster, “All the same, I didn’t ask you to do that. I’m perfectly capable of defending my own honor, you know.”

“Yeah,” he says, dismissively, “but it’s more fun when I do it.”

“Damon.”

“Elena?” He looks at her, unrepentant and amused and pleased with himself, and Elena looks back, and somehow feels herself slipping. It’s as if she blinked and then found herself in a totally different reality with new rules, where the safe walls of responsibility and rule-following that she’s built up around herself have secret passages leading out past them into the unknown, where everything can change in just the blink of an eye.

Bonnie breaks the silence. “It was a _nice_ bit of nonverbal spellcasting.” 

Damon looks at her, raises his eyebrows. “Thanks.” He looks back and forth between the two girls, and then jumps down and sits next to Bonnie. 

Bonnie extends her hand; he shakes. “Bonnie.”

“Damon.”

“Oh, I know.”

Damon chuckles, and looks sideways at Elena. She gives him a measuring look, which he answers with a blithe smile. She rolls her eyes, and then sits on his other side. “So,” he says, conversationally, digging in the pockets of his jacket, “Stefan’s really stinking up the pitch, huh?” Before she can voice disapproval, he pulls out a bag of sweets, which he offers to her. “Lemon drop?” Bonnie reaches across him and takes one; Elena extracts a hand from her pocket to take one as well. 

“You got Aimee Bradley to go away,” Bonnie says, “ _and_ you brought snacks. You can feel free to sit with us any time you want.”

Elena leans back in her seat and shoots Bonnie a look behind Damon’s back, a look that says _I know what you’re doing_. His friend in the Hogs Head must have been _really_ good-looking. 

The students around them surge to their feet, one of the Gryffindor chasers having just scored a point. 

Damon groans, then tosses three candies into his mouth. “God, our team sucks this year.”

Elena bumps him with her elbow. “If you’re going to sit here, you _do_ have to be nice about both teams, because they’re both our friends.”

“No, the Hufflepuff _captain_ is your friend,” Damon argues, “and he’s probably done the best he can with them. But look at them.” 

“They’re not that bad,” Elena insists.

“That’s the worst part,” Damon complains. “They’re _almost_ good. Do you know how many times they’ve _almost_ scored?”

“Maybe Jeremy’s just a really good keeper.”

“Nah, their formations always break at the last second. It’s just basic skittishness. They’re a quidditch team who’re afraid of flying.”

“I notice you’re not on the pitch,” Elena says. “Were there no openings, or didn’t you make the cut?” 

He laughs. “I’m not really one for organized team sports. Or organization. Or teams…” 

“We get it,” Bonnie says, “you’re the lone ranger.”

“I think you’re just afraid of getting a little dirty,” Elena says.

“I don’t see you playing,” Damon says.

“I used to.” 

“And?” 

“I quit.”

“Interesting. Because?” Damon raises one eyebrow, but he doesn’t look teasing or sardonic anymore; he’s just asking. 

She opens her mouth and then closes it again, the usual answer of academics and responsibility falling flat. She lifts her shoulders slightly and lets them drop. “I guess it just didn’t seem important anymore.”

He nods, looking thoughtful. She remembers abruptly that he quit _all_ of it – the quidditch and the academics and the responsibility, left all of it behind, even though he could have had all of it back again, even though he had to know that his decision would hurt people close to him. 

It sounds more tempting, more understandable, than she would like to admit. 

“So,” Bonnie says, “about non-verbal spellcasting.” 

Damon turns to her, giving the effect that he had to tear his eyes away from Elena. “You’re in sixth year, right? How’s that been going?”

Bonnie snorts. “Terrible. We might as well all be eleven years old again and not sure which way to hold our wands.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right. Anyone demonstrate an affinity right away?”

“I heard a few of the Ravenclaws are picking it up, but we don’t have class with them.”

“Well, _you_ ’re probably just more suited to divination, given your family,” Damon says. “It’s a different kind of silence: blank mind, listening to the universe, that whole juju, right? Non-verbal spellcasting is more about focus. You should see about getting an exemption.”

“Uh, I’m going to get it,” Bonnie says, derisive. “I just need practice.”

“Okay, let’s see it,” Damon says. He pours a lemon drop from the bag onto his palm and holds it up. “Float the sweet. Summon the sweet. Transfigure the sweet. Whatever you want. Go for it.”

Bonnie pulls her wand out of her sleeve and points it at Damon’s hand. He waits patiently. Elena gets tired of watching Bonnie glare at a hard candy, and turns her attention back to the game. Gryffindor’s in the lead, but not so far ahead that the snitch couldn’t change things – and Stefan _has_ seemed a little distracted. Hopefully it’s just because he’s keeping an eye on the team, since they have a few new players and they’re flying different formations this year, and not because he’s noticed his long-lost, disreputable brother sitting with his friends, amicably giving Bonnie tips interspersed with teasing while she attempts to shush him back to silence.

Elena doesn’t know why he’s here – why he keeps seeking her out, why he’s decided he likes her, why he’s making the effort to be friends. But the strangest part is that for all the suddenness, it feels natural. Like all along there’s been some gap she wasn’t aware of, a space in her life or among her friends which was kept empty just waiting for him. She doesn’t have to make room for him; something about him already fits. 

Bonnie lets out a surprised laugh, and Elena looks over in time to see the lemon drop float slowly into the air, a foot above Damon’s hand, then two feet, then three. Damon stands up and grabs it before it gets any further, saying, “Well, that’s just irresponsible, you’re going to hit the players.” 

Bonnie beams. “I think I figured it out, let me try again.”

He tosses it to her and retakes his seat. “Try it yourself, my hands are getting sticky.” He sits, ducks his head down close to Elena, and says, “We still losing?”

“ _You_ are still losing,” Elena says primly. “ _We_ are winning.”

“Just if you want to be technical about it.” 

“Oh, if you want to be _technical_ about it, then we’re creaming you.”

Damon sighs, and grumbles, “Good for Stefan, I guess.”

Elena looks at him curiously. “Did you come to see him play?”

“Nah,” he says dismissively, “obviously I’m here to see you.”

“Damon.”

“Do you doubt me?” he asks, turning to give her a challenging look. 

“Seems to me you might have multiple motives.”

“Oh yeah, I’m also here to support my house.”

She crosses her arms, and he tilts his head at her, then shrugs out of his jacket and drapes it around her shoulders. “No,” she says, “I’m not –”, then gives up. She _is_ cold, and the black leather has soaked up the heat of the sunlight and of Damon’s body. She pulls it close around her, and looks sideways at today’s faded black Muggle clothes. “Do you even own school robes?”

“They’re at the cleaners.”

“Oh my god, you don’t, do you?”

“I have them _somewhere_.” Out of nowhere, he swats her knee. “Look, it’s _right there._ ” 

She follows where he points and sees the snitch, hovering hummingbird-light only a couple yards below Stefan. The Hufflepuff seeker is halfway across the pitch, but he has the better vantage point – and once he sees the snitch he might very well be able to fly in and grab it out from under Stefan before he notices. “So, what, do we shout at him?” Elena asks breathlessly. “What if he doesn’t hear and the other seeker does?”

“And wouldn’t that be cheating anyway?” Damon says, wryly. 

Before Elena can debate the point, across the field, Lexi bellows, “STEFAN!” Stefan looks at her bewildered, and then following her signal, looks down. By the time he realizes what’s happening, the Hufflepuff seeker is already flying headlong toward him. Elena claps both hands over her mouth, but Stefan flies a quick spiral downwards, then flips upside-down, grips the broom with his knees, and reaches out to grab the snitch with both hands, right before the opposing player streaks under him. The stands erupt. Elena whistles, and then turns and raises her eyebrows at Damon smugly.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, “it’s easy to achieve total domination when you’re the jock house.”

She pouts at him. “Oh, sore loser. Why am I not surprised, coming from the loser house.”

“I’m telling Donovan you said that.”

She laughs, and looks back at the pitch to see Lexi flying a slow loop around the field, waving to her friends and high fiving people. Lexi’s eyes land on Damon, and narrow.

“Hey, Lexi,” he says, casual.

“Hey, dick,” she answers, and flies away.

Damon reaches over and pats Elena’s knee, and gets to his feet. “I should go, before Stefan sees me.”

“Why don’t you stay and congratulate him?” she suggests. With Stefan in a good mood, they might actually get somewhere.

“Better not,” Damon answers calmly. “Don’t want to sour the victory.” He nods at her, waves at Bonnie, and turns to go.

Elena calls after him, “Wait, your jacket!”

He looks back at her, and smirks. “Hang onto it for now. You know where I live.” And then he slips into the crowd, his black t-shirt lost among all the black robes, and is gone.

Elena blinks, and looks over at Bonnie – who, she finds, is giving her a particularly delighted version of the girlfriend-eyebrows. “What?” Elena says.

“He seems…friendly.”

“Yeah,” Elena says, neutrally, “it was definitely nice of him to work on the non-verbal stuff with you. I’m awful, I haven’t been practicing at all.”

“ _Not_ what I meant,” Bonnie retorts. “I meant he seems friendly with _you_.”

“We’ve only met one other time, twice if you count the train.”

Bonnie laughs. “Well, you clearly made an impression.” She lifts her cupped hands to show Elena the lemon drop, which she’s transfigured into a pale yellow crab which is scuttling sideways, back and forth along her palm. Elena coos at it and pokes it with a finger, earning a tiny pinch. 

“Miss Gilbert?” 

Elena looks up. “Professor Saltzman, hi.”

“Can I have a word?”

“Sure.” Elena puts her arms through Damon’s jacket, scoops up her things in one hand, and points at Bonnie. “You’re coming to the victory party later, right?”

“If I can get away,” Bonnie assures her.

Elena follows her professor back into the castle and into an empty classroom. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” he answers, a little stiffly. “Were you sitting with Damon Salvatore at the match?” 

Elena self-consciously pulls Damon’s jacket tighter around herself, and answers, “He’s Stefan’s brother.”

Alaric gives her a look which communicates just how little he was fooled by that non-answer. “Yeah. I’d feel a lot better if you didn’t spend time with him.”

Elena raises her eyebrows in surprise. “Sorry?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself, Elena, you know what I said.”

“Don’t you two know each other?” 

“Yeah, that’s why I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“There’s nothing _to_ be a good _or_ a bad idea,” Elena says. 

“You’re wearing his jacket.”

“It was cold! He was being nice!”

“He’s not a nice person.”

“Maybe you’re wrong, Rick!” He looks at her mournfully, which she ignores – she’s not about to call him ‘professor’ when he’s so obviously not speaking in that capacity. “Relax,” she tells him, backing towards the door, “you can tell Jenna that I’m doing fine, and there’s nothing to worry about.”

“I think she’d be less worried if you weren’t hanging around with a twenty-one-year-old school dropout,” Alaric calls after her.

“He’s _finishing_ his school,” Elena says over her shoulder, “and I’m not hanging around him.”

But as she walks away down the corridor, she feels the beginnings of a plan starting to hatch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sports, amiright?
> 
> Chapter title from "Sober" by Lorde.
> 
> Hope you enjoy! And pretty please leave me comments!! The new job is sapping my energy, and chapter nine is still giving me trouble, so I could use the encouragement!


	6. we're looking up at the same night sky and keep pretending the sun will not rise

Elena has a vague sense of where the entrance to the Hufflepuff common room is because of long acquaintance with Matt, but when she gets there, there’s no portrait to ask or even a door on which to knock. She stands fidgeting outside for nearly twenty minutes before a small gaggle of third-years emerges out of a dark corner crammed with random boxes and barrels. They take one look at her red-hemmed robes and halt in clannish suspicion, and she resists the impulse to roll her eyes, offers a reassuring smile, and says, “I'm hoping you can help me. I’m looking for somebody.”

“Donovan’s in class,” a boy answers, a bit rudely.

“I’m not looking for Matt,” Elena says patiently, crossing her arms. “Is Damon Salvatore in there?”

“Maybe,” the kid says, indifferently. “I’m not going back in to find out.”

“Are you on your way to class?”

“No.”

“Then, yes, you are, or I’m going to personally take five points from Hufflepuff for every minute I have to stand here.”

One of the other students blurts in a cracking voice, “You can’t do that!”

Elena sighs. “Yeah, you’re right, I can’t. I would definitely get in trouble. And you _could_ run all the way to the offices and tell on me to a professor, _or_ you could just,” she shrugs, “I don’t know, go back in, and tell Damon Salvatore that I’m looking for him.”

The kid glares at her, then turns on his heel and disappears back around the corner. Elena smiles pleasantly at his friends, and waits.

He reemerges after a few minutes, snaps, “Told him, happy now?”, and stalks off without waiting for an answer. 

“Thanks!” she calls after him. He yells a few words back which could justify her deducting a handful of points, but she supposes he’s earned the right. She turns back around in time to see Damon walk out from behind a stack of boxes. 

“Oh, it’s you,” he says. “When he said ‘that bloody uptight Gryffindor’, I thought for sure it’d be Stefan.” 

She holds out his jacket.

He raises his eyebrows, and steps forward to take it. “And here I thought you were going to take the coward’s way out and make Donovan return it to me.”

“And why would you think that?”

He shrugs. “Usually, I’m the one that finds you.”

“I need to ask you something.”

He makes a face. “Is it about my brother?”

“No.”

He looks faintly mollified, and guesses, “Need help with your homework?”

“If I did, I would go to Caroline, not you.”

“Ouch.”

“Damon…”

He lifts his hands to demonstrate innocence. “Of course. Ask away.” 

Elena takes a breath. “Can you get me books from the restricted section?”

Damon’s eyebrows migrate upwards. He smirks.

“If you won’t do it, just say so.”

“No, I’m just surprised, that’s all.” 

She grits her teeth. “I’m not trying to learn dark magic or anything, I need them for a research project.”

“Then get your professor to write you a note, Elena.”

“It’s not an _academic_ project, Damon.”

He grins. “Actually,” he says lightly, “I was surprised that you hadn’t figured out how to sneak in there yourself.” 

She lets out a breath. “Well, they don’t exactly make it easy, Damon.”

“That’s the _fun_ of it.”

She rolls her eyes. “I can get you a list of what I’m looking for – I don’t know how many of them will be there, but I know –”

“Oh, I didn’t say I’d do it.”

“Oh my god,” Elena exclaims, “will you or won’t you?”

“I won’t.” Damon nods decisively, and takes a step closer. “I will not get books from the restricted section for you.”

“Right.” She hates that she feels surprised. She hates even more that she feels hurt. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have bothered you, I won’t again.” She turns to flee, but Damon grabs her arm, and when she spins back to protest, she runs into his chest. “ _Damon_.” 

“I will not _get_ books from the restricted section for you,” he repeats, calmly. And then he grins. “ _But_ , I’ll help you sneak in, and you can get them yourself.”

A distant part of Elena thinks, _Oh, this is why Alaric was worried_ , but out loud she says only, “Why?”

He shrugs. “Out of the goodness of my heart, I feel I must share my expertise.” He looks down at her and waggles his eyebrows. “And this way, you have to do all the tedious reading of book spines.”

She could still back out. She could forget the whole thing, and order the books from Flourish & Botts over the summer. No one is making her do this. She looks up into Damon’s eyes, barely a foot away from hers, and makes a decision. “Alright,” she says. “I’m in. What do we do?”

He nods. “Do you have an invisibility cloak?”

She makes a face at him. “No, of course not. Do you?”

“Well, no, but I thought I’d ask. It’d sure make it easier, wouldn’t it?”

She crosses her arms.

Damon rolls his eyes. “Relax, Elena. You act like I’ve never snuck girls out of Gryffindor tower before. I’ve got it under control.”

\---

Three Thursdays later, about an hour before lights out, Elena walks out of the portrait hole, head low, in the middle of a group of lanky fourth-year boys. It’s the one night a month that the first-years have Astronomy up on the tower, and so Damon’s counting on the professors and prefects being so focused on making sure that the tykes all get back to the dorms safely that they won’t miss one absent sixth-year. Elena has also been going in and out of the tower on a constant, irregular loop all day, in the hopes that the Fat Lady won’t remember whether she’s in or not. Aimee Bradley will probably notice – Elena left a few pillows under her duvet, transfigured so that they rise and fall to imitate a sleeping person’s breath, which will only gain her so much grace because Aimee _will_ snoop – but she’ll probably also sit on the information until she can use it to greatest effect, and by then Elena will have her books.

She ducks out from among the fourth-years and heads down a side corridor, waving at classmates she passes and occasionally stopping to have a quick conversation. She can’t help but be glad that Damon isn’t witnessing this portion of their cloak-and-dagger plan; she feels like everyone’s watching her, and she’s _sure_ she looks self-conscious and awkward and up-to-no-good.

She takes a circuitous route down from the tower and ends up in the hallway right outside the charms classroom, where she leans up against a wall and practices non-verbally transfiguring one of her hairpins into different colors. When there’s no one looking, she turns to the portrait on the wall. “You’re Carlotta, right? Damon said to tell you he says hello.”

The old woman in the portrait laughs, loudly enough that Elena glances nervously down the empty hallway, but of course nobody comes running. “I should have known,” Carlotta says. “Nobody else has used this passageway for years. You can tell him that if he wants me to keep quiet about your little tryst, then it’s the same deal as always.”

“Oh, it’s not a tryst,” Elena corrects her. 

“And I’m not a fool, dearie,” Carlotta answers, chuckling. “You go along and tell Damon what I said.” 

“Thanks?” Elena says. She looks around; there’s still no one in sight so she lifts her wand and taps the four-leaf-clover carved into the frame of the painting, four times in quick succession. The wall next to it opens inwards.

“Have fun,” Carlotta says, gleefully.

“I won’t,” Elena says under her breath, slipping into the dark and pushing the doorway shut behind her. She lights her wand and carefully picks her way down the long winding passage, taking the turns that Damon drilled into her head until finally she comes up on a dead end. Then she douses her wand, lowers herself into a sitting position, and waits. 

She has snacks in her pockets, but she doesn’t have much to _do_ that can be done in the dark, and she doesn’t want to leave her wand lit just in case someone notices the glow through a crack in the door – assuming that this wall will open into a regular door, and assuming that there are cracks in the meantime. So she wraps her arms around her knees and absently munches on a pear tart, listening to the faint sounds of eleven-year-olds being taught astronomy somewhere on the other side of the wall. When she finishes the tart she puts her hair up in a twist, and then gets bored, untwists, and braids it.

Class lets out at quarter past ten, and Elena quietly gets to her feet and backs a few paces away from the end of the tunnel, holding her breath as students and teachers alike file past her hiding place. When the sounds have faded completely away, she retakes her seat and resumes waiting.

Finally, a small square section in the center of the wall opens out, and Damon’s face appears on the other side. “How you doing in there?” he asks.

“Fine,” Elena answers, stiffly getting to her feet to see him better. “Did you _have_ to pick the passage right next to the _one_ class that’s being held at this time? I was sure Professor Bennett was going to sense me, or something.”

“It’s closest to the library,” he says. “Come on out.”

“You’re kidding me,” she says. “It doesn’t open any bigger?”

“You should see some of the other ones,” he says. He drums an impatient rhythm on the wall with his fingertips, says, “Come on, we don’t have all night.” Grumbling, Elena gets a grip on the opening and boosts herself high enough to get her head and shoulders through. “I got you,” Damon says, and picks her up and pulls her through. He sets her on her feet, takes one look at her, and sighs. “I _told_ you you couldn’t wear that.”

“I _know_ ,” Elena retorts. She takes her robes – this set embroidered with patterns of red ribbons, a gift from Jenna – and pulls them over her head, then tosses them back into the open passageway. “But I don’t usually wear Muggle clothes, so if I left my common room looking like _this_ somebody would have noticed.” It had actually been difficult to dig up something appropriate for subterfuge – she settled on light gray jeans with holes in the knees and an old black jumper that’s running a little thin. 

Damon, who has forgone the jacket but otherwise is dressed exactly the same as usual, looks her up and down, and bobs his eyebrows. “I’m noticing.”

She swats him. “Shut up.”

He grins. “Last chance to back out.”

“I’m not backing out, are you backing out?”

“No, but if we hear somebody coming, I’m gonna push you over and run the other way.” He points his wand at the entrance to the passageway until it closes, nods in the direction of the library, then says, “Let’s go, super-spy.”

He walks in long, unhurried strides, his footsteps echoing in time with hers as they cross the long corridor side-by-side. They slip out a side door and cross the green quickly; Damon pulls his wand out of his back pocket and unlocks the library door. “A first year spell gets us in,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s like they _want_ us to do this.” 

“Well, they don’t,” Elena hisses, “so we should probably go in before somebody sees us.”

He laughs softly, but opens the door a crack and pushes her gently through.

The sconces in the castle were still lit, if dimly, but the library is dark. When the door closes behind them, Elena has to freeze for a moment and get her bearings, reimagine the room the way she knows it. “The restricted section is…” she murmurs.

“This way,” Damon whispers, his breath tickling her ear. She feels his fingers slip through hers, and then she finds herself a step behind him, being led along. Occasionally he announces “Step up,” or “Table to your right,” under his breath, but mostly he just stays close; he’s not pulling her, he’s letting her know where he is and letting her follow. They clamber over the rope which ineffectively separates the restricted section from the rest of the library, and then Damon sends up a faintly glowing ball of light to hover over the bookshelves, and Elena digs the list she copied out of her journal from her pocket.

“You know what you’re looking for?”

“I know which authors I’m looking for, and I think some of them should be here.”

“You think?”

“Madame Fell got a book for me with the reference spell and said it was all there was in the main collection.”

“So?”

“So why didn’t she say it was all there was in the library?” Elena glances up from her list and looks back the way they came. “Speaking of which, do you know how to fire up the reference spell? It’d be a lot quicker.”

“No can do,” Damon says, briskly. “Too easy to trace.”

“Well, then I guess I’d better get started.”

“Be my guest.”

She makes a face at him. “You’re really not going to help?”

“I helped plenty,” he says, unapologetic. “The rest is a-a-all you.”

It takes longer than she would like to work her way through the shelves. Obviously, it would help if she knew which books she was looking for, or even how many, but all she can do is scan the shelves for titles or authors she recognizes. And then there’s the constant worry that one of the books will start singing or flying or transform itself into a dragon, or something else equally disruptive and unhelpful. Evidently, no one ever told wizard publishers the adage _just because you can, doesn’t mean you should_. Damon makes the mistake of coming close enough to complain to her in a whisper about how slowly she’s moving, and she puts three books into his arms and shushes him. She doesn’t want to miss something and have to come back a second time.

Finally, she looks at the shelves, and at her list, and at the now-quite-large pile of books Damon’s begrudgingly waiting with. “I think that’s all of them,” she whispers.

“Great,” he answers drily. “I was worried you were going to move the entire section into your bedroom, but this many won’t be noticeable at all.”

“Is that _your_ problem?” Elena retorts.

“Oh, _somebody’s_ feeling confident.” He jerks his head toward the door, and Elena skips forward to hop over the rope and down the stairs. 

The night air feels like freedom, and the light of the stars is almost as bright as daylight. She dashes across the grass and waits under the lintel while Damon walks more staidly toward her. He raises his eyebrows at her, and she grins. “Alright, pipe down,” he says. “There’s still plenty of chances for you to get caught.”

“Haven’t yet, though.”

Damon pushes open the door a crack with his foot, and pokes his head in. “After you,” he says, gesturing. They retrace their steps back to the passage, which Damon reopens by twisting an ornamental flower on a pillar; he hands her the books so he can dive through first with a _thump_ on the other side, and then she passes the books across to him, pulls herself up into the hole, and lets him help her down. He hands her her dusty robes from the ground, picks up the books, and nudges her.

“What?”

He nods at his armful, says, “Wanna get a look at them?”

“Right now?”

“Yes, right now.”

They never really had a plan for this part, for after the heist itself – and she’s realizing now that she’s already out so far past curfew that there really is no point in going back now, to be scolded and questioned and probably end up in Alaric’s office for an additional lecture besides the one she’ll inevitably get from her own head of house. She has a better chance of getting away with it if she stays out all night. She answers, “Yeah, I really do.” 

“Come on.” He sets off down the passageway, and, tripping over the robes in her arms, she follows.

“Where are we going?” Elena asks after a minute. “These aren’t the turns toward Carlotta.”

“Nope,” Damon says.

“Oh, she said to tell you by the way, ‘same arrangement as always’.”

“I figured as much.”

“What is the arrangement?”

“That’s for me to know and you to not pester me about. Now, shhh, before somebody hears you and hexes us through the wall.”

“It does _not_ work like that,” Elena protests indignantly, and gets shushed again.

They come up on a dead-end, which Damon opens with a murmured word; the passageway slides open, and Elena finds herself in the entranceway just off the Great Hall. They’ve only made it a few steps out when Elena grabs the back of his shirt and whispers, “ _Wait_.” They pause, and can just make out the sounds of footsteps in the Great Hall. “Teacher,” she whispers. 

Damon takes a step back, bumping into her, and asks, “What do you think, do we go back?”

Elena listens: the footsteps don’t grow any louder. “No, I think he’s going the other way. The last thing we want to do is retreat and run into him on the other side.” 

Damon cranes his neck and peers around the corner. “Oh hey, it’s Rick.”

Elena groans quietly. “Great.”

Damon looks back at her, eyebrows raised. “Yeah?” he says, grin widening. “You think we should go say hi?” 

“Don’t you dare,” Elena hisses, grabbing his arm and yanking on it, which turns out to be a mistake; a book slips out of his grip and Elena only barely manages to catch it in her robes. She looks up, outraged, but Damon’s laughing silently, and a smile pulls at her mouth against her will. “This is not funny,” she tells him. 

“It almost seems like you don’t want to be seen with me,” he whispers back. “I should be insulted.”

“I don’t want to be seen _breaking rules_ with you.”

He snorts. “You’re gonna have to take what you can get in that regard, Elena.” He leans around the corner again, then nods at her. “Coast clear.”

They slip past the open doorway, and then into an alcove and down a staircase. Damon pokes yet another painting, which reveals yet another door, opening out at last on the infamous Hogwarts kitchens. “Won’t somebody find us here?” Elena asks, hovering in the doorway while Damon walks in like he owns the whole castle.

“Nah,” he answers, dropping her books on the wide center table. “Maybe in the old days, but it’s mostly staffed by humans and the odd free elf now, and they’ve got regular hours and rooms elsewhere. We’ll just have to skeddadle by the time the bakers get up.” He gestures grandly, and Elena walks around the table to join him. Damon drums his fingers on the table, and then steals an apple from a basket and hops up to sit on one of the counters so he can eat it. 

Elena sets her robes down on a stool, places her one rescued book on the table, and starts flipping through, jumping to the most relevant chapters and then moving on from there. One of the books, when opened, conjures a shadowy mirror-image figure of her in the air above it, which snarls and laughs at her until she shuts the book. Another duplicates itself every time she turns a page, so that soon she’s surrounded by identical copies of the same boring reference book, covering the table and then winking into existence in the middle of the spice rack. Mercifully, the copies vanish when she shuts the book in frustration. 

Damon gets bored eventually and comes down from his perch to sidle over to her. He leans down, his elbow on the table and his chin resting in his hand, and asks, “What is it you’re looking for, if I may be so bold as to ask?”

In lieu of an answer, she removes a book from the middle of her to-read pile and slides it over to him.

He reads aloud, “ _Doppelgangers, a complete magical guide_.” He clears his throat, asks, “You’re studying doppelgangers?”

“Yes,” Elena says absently, not looking up from her skimming.

“Well,” he says, “ _that’s_ certainly an interesting topic.”

Elena smacks the table. “See, that’s the thing!”

Damon removes his elbow from the table. “Uh, what is?”

“It’s not interesting _at all_ ,” she answers. “Everything I’ve read says the same thing: the doppelganger doesn’t have any special powers or immunities, they’re not automatically good or evil, they lead all sorts of different lives. The doppelganger arises by magical occurrence, but it’s not directly caused by a curse or a spell. There’s books upon books speculating on where they come from and why they exist, whether there’s only specific lines of doppelgangers or whether there’s unlimited numbers of them popping up randomly, but nobody knows. It’s a whole subject of question marks. Some people doubt they even exist at all.”

“So?”

“So _why_ is everything on the subject restricted?” Elena waves her hands at the table, says, “Why doesn’t the school want me reading this? What harm could it _possibly_ do?” 

Damon looks down at the book in his hands, and flips open the cover. Then, after a frozen moment, he wordlessly slips her book out from under her and replaces it with his.

The table of contents starts out like so many others she’s already seen: a part one on origins, a part two on known doppelgangers in history, a part three on the prevailing theories on how many lines of doppelgangers they are.

And then: _Part IV: The Doppelganger and Its Uses in Dark Magic_.

The first chapter is just called “Binding”, the second one, “Blood”. The third and final chapter: “Sacrifice”.

Elena’s still staring at that one little word when she feels Damon’s hand come to rest on her back. “Are you alright?” 

Elena straightens, tearing herself away from the book. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”

“So,” he says tentatively, “that solves the mystery. Do you want me to take them back?”

“ _No_.”

He looks at her, almost seeming worried.

“No,” she repeats, more calmly. “I need to know more.”

\---

The sky outside the windows takes on that warm gray tinge that means that a melancholy blue is on the way with the first streaks of sunlight just behind, and they have to pack up and leave. Elena carries half of the books in a stack while still half-trying to read the one on top; Damon carries the other half under one arm, and slings Elena’s now-quite-crumpled robes over his shoulder. Over the course of the night, she’s gotten so used to following him that she doesn’t even ask what their destination is, just trails after him. Her mind is racing too fast and she’s too tired to be much worried about getting caught, anymore.

He leads them out onto the courtyard, where it’s chilly but getting lighter every minute. He lays her robes out on the dewy grass and gestures for her to sit on them, hands her the rest of the books, and then pulls out his wand and walks in a circle around her muttering. When he’s finished, she asks, “What was that?”

“Wards.” He sits beside her, picking up her feet and placing them in his lap so that there’s room for both of them. “No one can see or hear us.”

She narrows her eyes. “And we couldn’t we have done that earlier?”

“Nope,” he says, cheerfully, rubbing his thumb over her ankle. “I’m no good at the moving ones. And the castle disrupts that stuff anyway.” He reaches down and digs in the pockets of their re-purposed picnic blanket and reveals two scones, stolen from the kitchens, and offers her one. She considers it, and then considers scolding him. Reading it in her face, he rolls his eyes. “It’s not like we would have paid for it in the Great Hall in an hour, anyway.” 

She cracks a smiles, and takes it. “Thanks.”

“Didn’t know you’d get breakfast out of the deal, did you?”

“You’re full of surprises.”

He scoffs. “Nah. Exactly what it says on the tin.” He waves a hand at her, says, “Here, gimme those.” She hands over her books, taking the opportunity of movement to remove her feet from his person. Damon lays the books out on the ground and waves his wand over them, the same transfiguring spell she saw him use in the library. “You’ll have to be careful of opening the two spelled ones, still; I can’t cancel that out. But, they’ll all at least appear to be sixth-year level and perfectly unexceptional,” he says, a bit smugly.

Elena picks one up and flips through the pages; it’s now, ironically, a book on secrecy charms. “Okay, but how I am I going to read them to get my actual research done?”

He bobs his eyebrows. “You’re going to come find me and ask me nicely to untransfigure them.”

“Damon.”

“Would you rather they were just lying around your dorm all old-smelling and suspicious?” 

“Wouldn’t _you_ rather I didn’t have to bother you every time I need something?”

“Maybe,” Damon says. “You _are_ a total nuisance. But I guess I’m just a giver like that.” 

“It seems to _me_ ,” she says, lightly teasing, “that this is just an excuse.”

“An excuse?” he says. 

“To spend more time with each other.”

“Well, if you need an excuse,” he says, smirking, “you’re welcome.”

“ _Your_ excuse, not mine,” she says, laughing. She looks at him, carelessly sprawled out next to her, and asks, “Why’d you want me to come with you, tonight, anyway?”

“Told you. Didn’t want to have to do the shelf-reading.”

“Yeah, but you could have been done with the whole thing so much faster if you weren’t dragging me around behind you. And then why’d we go to the kitchens? You could have just sent me to hover around the portrait hole to wait for morning.”

He shrugs. “I was hungry.”

“Okay, so why take me with you? And why are we sitting here now, having a picnic and watching the sunrise?”

He looks at her sideways, and says, wryly, “You’re not the worst company in the world, Elena.”

She feels compelled to point out, “I used to be more fun.”

He laughs. “You snuck out of your room, hid out in a secret passageway for hours, stole forbidden books, saved us from getting caught, are on the verge of uncovering a vast doppelganger conspiracy, and are now eating stolen food while invisible. You did okay.”

She looks away. The edge of the horizon is tangerine orange and pink, and the blues nearest it don’t look sad anymore. Understatement has never felt so flattering. 

They wait, silently, until the sun is all the way over the horizon and the earliest risers are already milling around the courtyard on their way to breakfast or quidditch practice. Elena pulls on yesterday’s robes, they break the wards when no one’s looking, and then they blend in with the students who are starting a new day rather than still lingering at the end of the last one. 

Elena enters Gryffindor tower trailing behind a group of other sixth-years; the Fat Lady doesn’t notice or comment on her return. She drops her books beside her bed, to mix in with all the books she has out for other, legitimate research projects. And then she climbs into bed.

She can skip Potions just this once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *slaps roof of chapter* this bad boy can fit so many references to canon in it. (And yes, I didn't want to deal with the house elves. Sue me.)
> 
> Chapter title from "Ocean Avenue" by Yellowcard. Comments and kudos greatly appreciated! 
> 
> Happy Thanksgiving!


	7. the view from here is getting better with you by my side

If Elena thought that the all-nighter would pull Damon more closely into her orbit, she’s mildly surprised and a little bit disappointed to not be seeing much more of him at all. He’s just as mysteriously absent from all the usual goings-on in the castle as he’s always been; moreover, he doesn’t appear at any quidditch games, or at the library – he only turns up to let her know that he wants to meet. Elena grows proficient at recognizing him out of the corner of her eye, at passing notes in the middle of busy corridors, at having casual clandestine conversations standing on opposite sides of a corner, each pretending to be doing something else while they whisper the bare minimum of when’s and where’s. 

The where’s, annoyingly, are constantly changing. After five years of having two Slytherin best friends, Elena thought she already knew every place in the castle where it was possible for people of different houses to meet up, but it turns out that most of her usual haunts are open and inclusive on account of their being public, so finding a quiet location to study her contraband books without being caught has proven problematic. It’s especially difficult because the common areas of the castle are habitually inhabited specifically by Elena’s motley crew of friends, and that’s who she least wants asking questions about her activities with Damon. Elena vetoed the kitchens as a repeat location, since they’re only empty in the middle of the night and she needs sleep to be able to attend classes. Damon claimed to be unable to set wards within the castle itself, so working surreptitiously in the library or Great Hall was also out. Elena argued that she’s known him to read restricted books in the middle of the library, to which he responded, laughing, “That’s because I don’t care if I get caught.”

They met in the owlery once, under an umbrella Damon thoughtfully or perhaps sardonically provided, but they were frequently interrupted by students walking in to mail letters. They got tired of jumping up and hiding books every time they heard a step on the stair; the owls got confused by how many letters they pretended to be sending. They sat on the floor of the greenhouse a couple of times between classes; Elena did have a legitimate reason to be there, as she had several ongoing projects that she had to water and trim, but they still got very strange looks when other people did walk in. They tried a secret passageway, but it was tiresome conjuring light sources constantly, Damon hated that he couldn’t keep up his usual running commentary for risk of being heard, and Elena was leery about introducing any other portraits to their circle of secrecy. Carlotta was already winking at her every time she passed her in the hallway. Once, Elena and Damon happened to run into each other outside a little room on the seventh floor which suited them perfectly, with gentle lighting perfect for reading, a loveseat that they could both cram into comfortably, lots of spare parchment and ink on the table, and a lock on the inside of the door that enabled them to keep everyone out. But Elena couldn’t find it again when she went back later. 

Damon was surprisingly flexible and good-natured throughout the whole process. He even gave her a hand with the research itself – professedly because sitting there idle while she reads made him feel extraneous, but perhaps more out of a secret, sincere desire to be helpful. He read through all her notes, and spent their sessions reading book after book to verify old information and point Elena toward new information. He still complained non-stop, of course. But she’s making much more process with him than she would be without him; together, they went through over half of the books they took from the restricted section.

And she hasn’t had any additional talking-tos from Alaric, or unsubtle inquiries from Caroline. Bonnie asked after Damon once, but didn’t pry when Elena was vague. Stefan is still speaking to her, which can only signify that he has no idea. So she really thought they were getting away with it, which is why it’s a surprise when, one evening in the Great Hall when Elena’s still busily reading her charms homework while her stew gets cold and everyone else has already gone, Matt approaches her table awkwardly and says, “Hey, I thought I ought to tell you, I heard a rumor.”

She takes a moment to register his presence and process his words. “A rumor?”

“Yeah,” he says, shifting his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot.

She blinks up at him, and fills in the blank: “About me.” 

“Yeah.” 

And he’s telling her, when normally he would honorably ignore it. “How bad is it?”

“Not bad so much as weird,” Matt says, sliding in next to her. “People are saying you’re sneaking around with Damon Salvatore.”

Elena looks at him oddly. “How is that weird?”

“Uh, ‘cause he’s Stefan’s brother?” Matt says. “And he’s older? And everybody says he’s some kind of degenerate criminal?”

Elena snorts.

“Is this the first you’ve heard of this?” Matt asks.

“The rumor?” Elena says. “Yes, that is the first time I’ve heard it.” Matt gives her a look; she says, placating, “It’s not what you think.”

He groans. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

She starts to answer dismissively in the affirmative, then rethinks, and answers, “Probably not.”

“Should I be worried about you?”

She tilts her head. “No more than usual, I think.”

He sighs, and pulls her into a sideways hug. “You’ll let me know if you need anything?”

“Of _course_ ,” Elena says, willing herself to believe that it’s not a lie.

“Alright, then.” Matt nods, and gets up to leave.

“Thanks for telling me.

“Yeah, no problem.”

“Hey, Matt?” Elena asks, suddenly. He turns, waiting. “Where’d you hear it from?”

He shrugs. “A couple different people. Some my house. Some yours.”

“Bradley?”

He grimaces. “She has been kind of milking it, yeah.”

Elena sighs. “You know, most of the time I don’t mind that Bonnie and Car got sorted in Slytherin and I got sorted in Gryffindor without them, but times like this I think it might be nice not to have to room with that girl.” She adds, thoughtfully, “And then if she bothered me, I could just hex her.”

Matt eyes her. “Try not to get in too much trouble.”

“I won’t get in trouble, when do I get in trouble?” 

“Mostly when you start talking like this.”

Elena scoffs, and then notices Damon lurking under the arch in the entryway. She pushes her stew bowl away from her, slings her bag over her shoulder, and stands. She claps both hands together and points them at Matt. “I’m not going to get in trouble,” she tells him. “Just – don’t tell Stefan?”

“What would I tell him?” Matt says wryly. “That Aimee Bradley’s acting like she always acts, and you’re acting weird?”

“Exactly,” Elena says brightly. “It’s nothing.”

He rolls his eyes. “See you in class tomorrow.”

“Yeah, see you,” she answers, already thinking about how she’s going to play this. She opts to let something slip out of her bag just as she crosses under the archway, when a pillar is hiding her from most everyone’s view. She goes down on one knee to retrieve her belonging; Damon walks past her without stopping and drops a folded-up slip of paper into her open bag. Damon continues into the Hall; she stands and carries on her way, smiling.

Even if a few people have noticed, they’ve still gotten rather good at this.

\---

The note reads _5p.m. tomorrow, the boathouse_ , so the following day Elena switches some of her duties with a new fifth year prefect so that she’s free, puts some still as of yet unread books and a heavy blanket in her bag, and stops by the kitchens to beg for two cups of tea. By the time she finds her way to the boathouse, Damon is already waiting for her, absently charming shapes out of the clouds his hot breath makes in the cold air. She hands him a mug in lieu of greeting; he holds up his wand in his other hand and she obligingly pulls out the books and holds them out so he can remove the transfiguration spell. They wordlessly negotiate who was last reading what and who’s going to sit where; Damon casts a spell that protects them from raindrops slipping through the cracks of the old building, and Elena summons a contained fire. Then they open their respective books and settle in.

After a few minutes, Damon announces, “The guy who wrote this was a _creep_.”

“They’re dark magic how-to’s, Damon,” Elena answers without looking up. “Pretty much all the authors are creeps.”

“Yeah, well, I think this guy is the worst.”

She snorts. “Worse than the author who was convinced there had to be some magical use for doppelganger saliva, even though he tried it in plenty of spells and it did nothing?”

“That guy was just weird, this guy is freaking me out.” Damon shuts the book and sets it aside with a theatrical shiver. Elena looks up and makes a face at him; he rolls his eyes. “Well, how’s your book going?”

“Same as usual,” she answers. “Step one: find a doppelganger. Step two: bottle as much of their blood as possible to use in future at your leisure. Step three: sacrifice your doppelganger and achieve world domination.” She sighs, and scans down her notes. “It’s giving more detail than any of the other books have, but in a _here are some tips on insinuating yourself into a doppelganger’s life and gaining their trust_ kind of way, not actual theory or history.” 

Damon lies back on his forearms and cracks his neck. “I think when we’re done with this, next we should work on you becoming an expert in cute, fluffy animals.”

Elena laughs. “None of the books would be restricted. We could just work in the library.”

“Aww, come on,” he says. “You wouldn’t miss this?”

“All but freezing to death in the boathouse?” she says. “No, I don’t think I would.”

“Not the boathouse. Having me all to yourself.”

Elena looks over; he’s smirking at her. She raises her eyebrows, says, “I didn’t know I had any competition, Damon.”

He laughs. She lifts her book up a little to hide her smile, and flips the page.

“There’s no rule that says that we couldn’t study fluffy animals in secret,” Damon says, warming to his topic. “Breeding new magic animals is illegal, we could do that. We could create the first flying squirrels.”

“Flying squirrels already exist.”

“Real flying squirrels. With wings. Or flying bunnies!”

She reaches out blindly and grabs his arm. “Damon.”

“What?”

“Listen to this.” She points to a section in her book and reads, “ _The efficacy of the sacrifice does not rely on the doppelganger’s innocence, but you must still be discerning, as the doppelganger’s power is tied to their physical resemblance to the line. Any spells or magical events which have broken that tether of physical continuity, not accidentally but substantially, will erase the power in the blood._ ”

“Well,” Damon says, sitting up and looking over her shoulder. “That’s new.” 

“Substantially broken the tether of physical continuity,” Elena repeats.

“So, like, polyjuice potion?” Damon guesses. “If a doppelganger transforms into somebody else, then their doppelganger status is revoked?”

“No, that wears off, that makes it an accidental change.”

“Look who reads magical theory for fun,” he says, sarcastic. “What about magical event? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know! Magical event, I think that means something that…that _happens_ , not a spell, that has a magical effect?”

“Like what? Like, using a portkey?”

“No, that’s just _using_ a spell, that’s not an _event_ ; an event’s like – like –” She stops, and stares at the words on the page. “Like getting bitten by a werewolf,” she says, slowly. “If you are bitten by a werewolf, that’s not a spell, it’s something that _happens_ , but its effect is that you become a different sort of creature. Once a month you become a wolf – that breaks the tether of physical continuity.” She nods, feeling more certain every moment. “To be ineligible for the sacrifice, the doppelganger would have to find a way to turn into a different magical creature.”

“Vampire,” Damon says.

She looks up at him; there’s something in his voice she can’t read. “Yes,” she says, “I think a vampire would work, too.” 

The moment of stunned silence doesn’t last long. “So,” Damon says, wryly, “all a doppelganger on the run would have to do is get bit, and turn into a fearsome and uncontrollable monster.” He snorts. “Maybe the monstrousness is negligible and it’s actually the getting bit that’s the common denominator.” He ducks his head and lunges like he’s going to bite Elena’s neck; she squirms out of the way and smacks him on the shoulder. 

“You think you’re so clever,” she tells him distractedly, setting down the book and flipping to a fresh page in her notebook. She writes: _substantially break physical continuity. EVENT. or spell? werewolf/vampire._ “I think this is the answer,” she says out loud.

“Elena.”

She looks over; Damon is looking at her seriously, openly, not a trace of his usual sardonic cynicism about him. “What?”

“I haven’t asked before,” he says, carefully, “and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. But why, Elena?”

She looks away. “Why what?”

“Why are you looking into this? What is this ‘project’ of yours?”

If he’d asked her sooner, she probably would have lied to him, but she discovers, to her faint surprise, that the thought of someone knowing – of _him_ knowing – isn’t so impossible to bear anymore. She takes a deep breath, and says, keeping her voice as level as she can, “It was this past summer. I was in London, in one of those secondhand shops in Diagon Alley, you know, used cauldrons and remembralls and spelled watches and things?”

Damon nods.

“It was just in one of five knut bins, mixed in with all the other rubbish. A portrait, that looked just like me.” Damon doesn’t react; Elena says, “Not similar, not how people always say I look _just like_ my mother, but _just like me_. Like catching sight of myself in a mirror I didn’t know was there, like finding myself in the background of someone else’s photograph. Except it couldn’t be me, because someone else’s name was written on it, and it was dated 1864.” She gestures at the books scattered around them. “When I started, I just wanted to know what I was. If I was real. A person, or just the echo of somebody else.” She wraps her arms around herself. “But then the more I read, the less I understood, and then we found all _this_ , all the dark magic, and now –”

“You’ve been looking for a way out,” Damon says, heavily.

“Yeah.”

He nods, once. Then, leaning towards her, “Elena, have you told anyone?”

She lifts one shoulder and drops it. “I just told you.”

“Other than me.”

“No.”

“Elena,” he says, “ _why_?”

“I can’t tell Jeremy and Jenna, or Rick,” she says, shaking her head firmly. “They’ve lost too much already. They don’t need to be worried about this.”

“Okay, so, what about the super-witch squad?”

“They would want to _do_ something about it.”

“Great!” 

“No, because if someone does find me and come after me, they’d be in danger, too.”

“ _Elena_ ,” Damon says, exasperated.

“No, it’s okay,” she insists, “really. I was pretty spooked at first, but I’ve had some time to get used to it. The books are old, and I don’t think there are that many dark wizards anymore, let alone ones specifically on the lookout for a doppelganger. I’ll be fine. In all likelihood it won’t even ever come up.”

His face clouds over, and he reaches out and shuts the book sitting between them. She looks away, her face heating up, perplexed at his reaction, and angry at herself for wishing that he would have reacted differently – wishing that he’d taken her hand or pulled her into his arms or promised her everything would be alright. 

Without looking at her, he says in a strange, flat voice, “The picture, from the shop – did you buy it?”

She nods. “It’s hidden up in my luggage.”

“Can I see it?”

“Right now?” 

“Could you?”

“Could I walk the whole way back to Gryffindor tower, climb all the way to the top, and then drag myself back here with a picture that just looks like me, when you already know what I look like?”

“Yeah, could you?”

“Damon!”

“You don’t have to come all the way back, I’ll meet you at the bottom of the staircase outside the Fat Lady.”

She thinks about pointing out that somebody will see them, but no doubt he already realizes that. And if he’s serious, there has to be a reason. “Alright,” she says.

He nods, silently – another indication that _something_ is wrong – and cursorily transfigures the books back to inoffensive status. “I’ll meet you there.” 

She gathers her blanket and their tea things, and slings her bag over her shoulder. “Okay.”

\---

Her bedroom is blessedly empty of roommates and their prying eyes. Her luggage is under her bed, and the picture is tucked into the lining of her suitcase; Elena slips it into the sleeve of her robes without looking at it. She bought it because she didn’t like the idea of someone else finding it and recognizing her, but there’s also something in the look of the woman’s smile that unnerves her, so she doesn’t much like the idea of recognizing herself in it, either. She waves at the students in the common room, climbs back out of the portrait hole, and clatters down the stairs to where Damon is waiting.

He nods at a staircase that joins up with the one she just came down. “This way.”

“That one’s just about to –”

“I know.”

She jumps down with him onto the first step just as it detaches from the platform and starts to descend. Elena grips the bannister, and the staircase moves ponderously through the air. Damon barely appears to notice, but rather walks down and sits with his feet on the last step. He looks up at her, and she picks her way carefully down the stairs to stand above him, unwilling to risk the last step. She reaches into her sleeve and hands him the picture.   
He turns it over to look at it, and smiles a bitter, rueful smile.

Elena recites the caption from memory: “ _Katherine, 1864_. I haven’t been able to find out much about who she was.”

Damon hands it back to her, and says, “That’s Katherine Pierce.” 

She blinks. “You know of her?”

“I know her,” Damon says. “Or,” he says, “I certainly thought I did.”

“What?” Elena glances again at the date. “Was she absolutely ancient when you knew her?”

“Oh, she was beautiful,” he says vaguely. “Lot like you in that department. Very complicated and selfish, at times not very kind. But,” he bobs his eyebrows, “seductively so.” 

The staircase swings left, and Damon stands and steps onto another one crossing from the opposite direction; Elena hurries after before she can lose him. She’s barely found her footing when it shifts hard right, and she knocks into the railing. “That’s not…” she says haltingly. “You’re not talking about the girl you…left school for?”

Damon looks back at her and nods once. “The very same.”

“She looked like this,” she says, holding up the portrait, feeling the need for as much clarity as possible, “she looked like me?”

“She did.”

“But don’t you think we’re talking about two different people?” she asks. “I know she looks right, but these are _doppelgangers_ we’re talking about. This Katherine in the eighteen hundreds, and then your Katherine, now? And me, so I guess three of us.”

Damon doesn’t seem to hear her. He’s poised on the bottom step, scanning the middle distance, and then he _leaps_ – disappears from her sight briefly, and then appears again, having landed on another staircase twisting up in a spiral. He turns and looks back at her, and there’s only the briefest window when the two platforms are level with each other, so without thinking she nods at him, leans back, and launches herself across the space between them. Damon catches her, pulling her from the perilous open air, and for a second she locks eyes with him while he’s swinging her counter to the motion of the stairs, and the world ceases to spin. Then he sets her on the stair behind him, steadies her and lets her go, and she leans back against the railing and looks around her. Staircases are rising and falling at their sides and swinging narrowly just over their heads; on the other side of the chaotic, dancing interplay, she can see students climbing up and down staircases that are currently stationary, but she can’t make out their faces; she doubts if anyone can even tell that she and Damon are here. They’re at the exact center, slowly rotating and rising inexorably. 

Damon rests his forearms on the railing next to her, and says, “She was a friend of the family. Or, I suppose, she was someone the family took pity on. She stayed with us for a summer, and it was in my father’s will that we make sure she was looked after, so she moved in permanently after he died. I had my doubts about the legitimacy of the whole thing later, but at the time I didn’t question it.”

“You mean, Stefan knew her, too?” Elena asks.

“Yeah,” Damon says, “he did.”

She looks at him carefully, and recognizes the faraway, lost look in his eyes like she’s looking in a very different kind of mirror than the portrait in her hand. Grief. 

He says simply, “I was in love with her.”

“And?”

“And she was a vampire.”

It’s not what she was expecting. “The whole time you knew her?” He only nods. She glances down at the portrait, at the too-knowing look in the woman’s eyes, says, “So this is really her?” He doesn’t answer. “Did you know?” she asks. “That she was a vampire?”

“Yeah, I knew.”

And loved her anyway: it’s all through his voice. “Did she love you, too?”

“I thought so.”

“What happened?” she asks softly.

He shrugs. “I was never completely aware of everything she was up to, even when I was home, but she made some trouble, I guess. The Society for the Tolerance of Vampires turned up and entombed her for a hundred years as punishment, or to set an example, or to avoid accountability for whatever she’d done, I don’t really know. But…” His mouth twists. “You know. A hundred years, I would have been dead by then.”

And she already knows the rest of the story. “Did you never think of waiting until you finished school?” 

“No.” It’s the flattest denial she’s ever heard, said with perfect dismissiveness, as if waiting another two years to see the woman he loved was an impossibility, as unfathomable as trying to wait the whole hundred. 

She nods, as if she understands, even though she’s not sure that she does. She doesn’t know that she’s ever been so certain of anything. She can’t help but ask, “But then she wasn’t there?”

He pulls a face, self-aware and self-deprecating and a lot of other things which seem to circle back to himself and not to her. “I found out later she’d masterminded the whole thing, let everyone think she was trapped so she could have a little freedom. No one would think to look for her as long as she kept a low profile.” 

“And she didn’t tell you?”

“She did not.” He grimaces. “All this kind of sheds some light on it, actually. She was a doppelganger, she might have been on the run.”

“Now that you know, you could look for her,” she offers.

“I won’t.”

Elena tilts her head back and stares at the not-so-distant ceiling, lets herself succumb to dizziness just for a moment. Then she turns, places her forearms on the railing next to Damon’s, and says, “That day on the train, the way you looked at me…and then after, in the library, when you came to find me.” She swallows, and asks, “Was it because I look like her?”

He turns to her for the first time, looking straight into her eyes, and when she looks back she sees that same unshakable certainty as before; again, he says, quietly, “No.” But it’s no longer the look of a man who has been pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity and is certain he will push it again tomorrow, no matter what, because he knows no other way and he doesn’t want to be crushed. It’s not a certainty of despair, but of peace – of knowing where you belong so clearly that your heart leads you there unerringly, like being able to find your way home in the dark.

The staircase they’re on comes to a stop, and Elena steps off onto the next one without waiting to see where it connects to. She looks back at Damon with the solid ground underneath her feet and feels somehow that everything is still shifting – but now it’s the world that’s standing still and they’re the ones spiraling into someplace new, beyond where anyone can see them.

She manages to say, “Good night, Damon.” 

And then she flees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Check Yes Juliet" by We The Kings.
> 
> Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it!


	8. I'm just the sucker who let you fill her mind

A few days pass. Elena sees Damon in the hall and pretends she doesn’t notice him – of course, she always pretends she doesn’t notice him, but now she walks by without stopping to tie her shoes or drop anything. A week later she finds a note with a time and a location in his familiar chicken scratch twisted up in the blades of her knotgrass seedling in the greenhouse, but she pockets it without looking at it.

It’s too much. Too many revelations, about her and about him, about history and now, and it’s all too personal to Elena in too many ways. She didn’t even know what to do about the doppelganger escape clause when that had been the only discovery of the day. But the revelation that one of her doppelgangers may have turned vampire to escape a grisly fate, that her engineering of her own imprisonment may have been because someone was still after her – and then the fact that all of this was Damon’s infamous cursed ex? She can’t face it, any of it. She’s not ready.

She makes a cursory effort to transfigure her purloined library books to their original state herself, but only manages to shift the covers closer to their original colors without affecting any of the words inside. She shoves them under her bed, makes a trip to the library during its usual daylight hours of operation, and takes out every book which mentions magical events. She starts compiling a list of everything that would effect a substantial physical change; it remains discouragingly short, and the side effects are always prohibitively dire.

Her monthly astronomy date with Bonnie and Caroline arrives, and Elena shows up twenty minutes past the agreed time; they take in her bleary-eyed and distracted appearance and exchange glances with one another. Bonnie hands Elena a hot chocolate, Caroline makes room under her blanket, and Elena settles in between them and lets out a breath.

“Okay, seriously?” Caroline says. “We’ve let this go on a while, but I’m putting my foot down. _What_ is going on with you?”

“Sorry I was late,” Elena murmurs, hunching over so she can fit as much of herself as possible under the blanket. She threw on the first robes she saw, and they aren’t the heavy, winter ones she needs. “I was up late reading.”

“Reading for class?” Caroline challenges. “Because you’ve skipped more in the last month than I think you did in the first five years combined.”

“My grades are fine,” Elena answers. “Even with the skipping.”

“That’s not all, though,” Bonnie says. “You’ve been walking around practically insensible. You take Aimee Bradley’s abuse without seeming to care or even hear it.”

Elena wrinkles her nose. “Maybe I finally realized that she’s not worth the effort.”

“Elena!” Caroline exclaims, elbowing her not particularly gently. “You’re _clearly_ miserable! Let us _help_.”

Elena looks back and forth between them and takes a breath, starts to say that she’s sorry that she worried them, but she’s fine, really – and can’t force the lie out.

“Whatever it is, you can tell us,” Bonnie implores. “We’re not going to judge you.”

“I might judge you,” Caroline says, primly, “but sometimes that’s what you need.”

“It’s not that I think you’ll judge me,” Elena insists. “I promise, I do know you guys better than that.”

“Then _what_ , Elena?” Bonnie asks. “What could be this bad?”

She lets out a shaky laugh. Her friends wait, and she looks back and forth between them, trying to remember the feeling of confidence that she sees in their eyes, like there was really nothing they couldn’t fight and win. Finally, she forces out the words: “What do you know about doppelgangers?”

Bonnie blinks. “Not much, beyond the basic fact that they’re identical.”

“That’s about what I knew,” Elena says, “when I found out I was one.”

The story comes out slowly, haltingly, interrupted by shocked exclamations and questions. She tells them about recognizing herself in a portrait from the eighteen-hundreds, about the project she took on when she got to school, research which left her with more and more questions until she finally realized that the only reason anyone studied doppelgangers was to find out exactly how to kill them. She explains the loophole which would keep her from becoming a target, but which would seemingly, inevitably consign her to another tragic fate. She confesses that she didn’t tell them because she’s afraid of putting them in danger alongside her. “What about Alaric?” Bonnie asks. “Have you gone to him?”

“No,” Elena says. “Rick will tell Jenna, and Jenna will worry.”

“ _You’re_ worrying,” Caroline points out. “I don’t think it’s fair to save all the worry for yourself.”

“Typical Gryffindor,” Bonnie says wryly, “had to ride off solo, in a heroic blaze of glory and silent suffering.” She nudges Elena with her shoulder, Elena nudges back.

“Not _only_ that, but you had to do all the research yourself,” Caroline adds. “It’s no wonder you’ve been missing classes.”

Elena briefly considers letting it pass – just keeping this one, last secret. But so much of the weight of the last months has been lifted, and she doesn’t want to carry any more by herself. “Well,” she says, keeping her voice carefully neutral, “Damon was helping me with that.”

“Damon?” Caroline repeats, horrified. “ _Salvatore_?” Bonnie reaches over and smacks her.

“Yeah,” Elena admits. “All the books I needed were in the restricted section, and he helped me get them, and then he helped me hide them. And he did his share of research as well.”

“Why did it have to be _him_ , though?” Caroline complains.

Elena ticks off on her fingers: “He knew how to get his hands on illegal books. He wouldn’t ask too many questions. And he has seemingly no classwork of his own and basically nothing to lose.”

“Yes, but _Damon Salvatore_?” 

“Caroline,” Elena says, tiredly, “he was good. He was there for me.”

“Was?” Bonnie asks.

Elena wraps her arms around herself. “You remember the story, the girl, the one that was in the cursed tomb – or wasn’t – the one he dropped out for?” They both nod. Elena reaches into her sleeve where she keeps her wand and pulls out the portrait of Katherine. She’s having trouble putting it down, these days. It wasn’t imbued with the magic that would allow it to have awareness or carry on conversations, but Elena spends a lot of time looking at it anyway, watching Katherine’s slow smile, wishing she knew what pushed the other girl to make the decisions she did, and wondering if she’ll be looking out from a portrait of her own someday, smiling at the naivete of some new lookalike. She hands the picture to Bonnie. “This is her.”

Bonnie’s eyebrows fly up her face. “Wow.” 

“What?” Caroline cranes her neck to get a look, and then makes a face. “She looks awful, you’re way prettier.”

“No, you don’t get it,” Elena says, snatching the picture back. “From the minute he saw me on the train, he recognized me. Everything after, all the interest, all the times he sought me out, his willingness to help – what if it’s all because I look like her? Because he lost her and this is some kind of chance to do it over again?”

“Is it?” Caroline says.

“He says it’s not.”

“It’s not,” Bonnie says firmly. 

“You’re just saying that!”

“It’s not!” Bonnie insists. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you, and trust me, he’s seeing _you_.” 

“Hang on,” Caroline says, lifting a finger, “you’ve _seen_ the way he looks at her?”

Bonnie waves her off impatiently. “I only talked to him the once.”

“Why am I the last to know about this?” Caroline complains.

“Well, I had _no_ idea that any of _this_ was going on.”

Caroline remains unsatisfied. “When did you talk to him? Where was I?”

Bonnie rolls her eyes. “Okay, in the interest of full disclosure: Damon sat with Elena and me for the fourth quarter of the Gryffindor-Hufflepuff game. You were with your team. He made his entrance by hexing Aimee Bradley. He gave me tips on non-verbal spellcasting, and he gave Elena his jacket.”

Caroline gasps. “Is _that_ why your non-verbal spellcasting was better than mine for a few weeks?”

Bonnie ignores her. “Oh, and his friend from the Hogs Head has been giving me guitar lessons.”

“Since _when_?” asks Caroline, at the same time that Elena says, “ _What_?”

“Every Saturday in Hogsmeade, for the last couple months,” Bonnie says blithely. She gives Elena a look, says, “You’re not the only one who can sneak around, you know.”

“Yes, but out of the _castle_?” Elena says. “That’s much more sneaking than I did.”

“Well, of course,” Bonnie says, smugly. “You’re a Gryffindor. There’s only so bad you can get.”

“Oh, ‘cause guitar lessons are so-o-o bad,” Caroline snipes.

“No, but I am bad at them,” Bonnie says. “Enzo says that I –” Caroline and Elena both interrupt with variations on “Oooooh” and “ _Enzo_ ”, and Bonnie cuts off and fixes them both with a mock glare. “I _will_ hex you.”

“Is he nice?” Elena pipes up.

Bonnie smiles distantly. “He’s great. Funny and attentive, and with all the appropriate respect for how I could totally kick his ass.”

“He’d have to be an idiot not to know that,” Elena says.

Caroline sighs dramatically. “Everyone’s got a secret boyfriend but me.”

“Damon’s not my boyfriend,” Elena says.

“And you do, too, have a secret boyfriend, Car,” Bonnie puts in, drily, “except instead of you and the guy keeping it a secret, it’s somehow a secret _from_ you and e-e-everybody else knows.” Elena laughs.

“Okay!” Caroline says, raising her voice, “I will admit that I’m maybe, kind of, _almost_ dating my Salvatore brother,” she turns to Elena, and says pointedly, “if _you_ admit you might as well be dating yours.”

“I’m not though!” she protests.

“I don’t buy it,” Caroline says, stubborn. “Bonnie says he’s into you, and she’s the only one of us who’s been able to unqualifiedly land a guy, so her opinion should probably have more weight than yours.”

“Caroline,” Elena says, nearly begging, “I haven’t seen him in weeks. After everything, I kind of panicked.”

Caroline narrows her eyes at her. “Okay,” she says, “but I don’t think you panicked because you look like Katherine.” 

“Of course I did!” Elena exclaims. “Wouldn’t you?”

“ _I_ would,” Caroline says, “but _you_ aren’t, because if that’s what was upsetting you then you’d be avoiding Stefan, too, and you’re not.”

Elena blinks, caught off guard. “How did you even know that Stefan knew her?”

Caroline waves a hand dismissively. “Oh, come on, we’ve already established that I know way more about Stefan’s life than you do – just because I’d never seen a picture before doesn’t mean I don’t know about the woman his brother abandoned him for. Keep up.” Elena gapes at her. Caroline goes on, unperturbed: “I know you, Elena. It’s not in your nature to be suspicious of people; you trust them, even when they don’t deserve it. This thing with Katherine isn’t what’s bothering you.”

“So?” Elena says, shakily. “What is, then?”

“I think you’re freaked out just because of Damon,” Caroline says. “Because even though you look like his ex-girlfriend, you _know_ the way he is with you…is all about _you_. And that scares you.” 

“Why would that scare me?”

“I don’t know,” Caroline says. “Because if it’s real, then you just might have to let something new into your life? You couldn’t just go through the motions, you’d have to change, you’d have to risk something.”

Elena looks over at Bonnie. “I’m really like that?”

“Not always,” Bonnie says, tentatively. “But sometimes it seems like – like ever since your parents died, you’ve been afraid to move on. Like you didn’t want to hit any milestone without them, didn’t want to do anything they couldn’t see coming or hadn’t known to expect.”

“Prefect,” Caroline lists, “O.W.L.’s. Dating a guy that everybody approved of.”

Elena bites back an automatic protest, and tries to remember why, once upon a time, she wanted to be Stefan’s girlfriend. She remembers she was glad they were already friends, that she already knew who he was and didn’t have to worry about him surprising her, not being who she thought he was. It was a relief to know that he still cared about all the same things she did, Hogwarts and quidditch and their shared friends. It was even appealing that they were both in the same house; it made her feel less alone. Being with Stefan felt like a gentle reminder of what life was supposed to be like. 

The irony, of course, is that now she knows he was looking for that exact same reminder from her – a reminder he needed because his brother was gone. She says incredulously, “So it would be a step forward for me to date Damon because my parents _wouldn’t_ have approved of him? Because no one will?”

“No,” Bonnie says carefully, “it’d be a step forward because you’d be doing it because you want to, not because you think you ought to, or you’re expected to.”

“How do you know what I want?” Elena shoots back.

“I don’t,” Bonnie says. “But I know that you haven’t been happy lately. And I see now, that you’re carrying a lot – but,” she says gently, “I think maybe it was easier for you to carry it when you were with him.”

“It’s not that simple,” Elena says, quietly. 

“Maybe it is,” Caroline says. “No way to know for sure, unless you try.”

Elena lets out something halfway between a laugh and a groan. “What does any of it matter? I’ve been avoiding him for weeks. He stopped looking for me a long time ago.”

“So,” Bonnie says, “find him.”

Caroline shrugs. “You’re just going to have to fix it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In a way, even though it’s short and expository, this is my favorite chapter I’ve written. I love trying to bring the familiar Damon-and-Elena dynamic to life in a new setting, but this, Elena being understood and supported by her friends, is something that I felt like canon never fully gave us. It’s helped along by the mechanics of the AU: Damon’s a little less in need of redemption, Caroline’s not projecting her feelings for Stefan onto Elena’s relationship choices. But in essence it’s what I wish someone would have told Elena in the show, and so it was just very satisfying to write! I hope you all enjoy it.
> 
> Chapter title from "The Louvre", by Lorde.
> 
> I had my wisdom teeth out earlier today, so I'm doing a lot of sitting around twiddling my thumbs. If you leave me a comment, I'll love you forever!


	9. that slow-burn wait while it gets dark

Before Elena can work up her courage, the Christmas holidays loom right around the corner, and then there’s present-buying trips and last-minute packing and mid-year deadlines, all in a mad rush. Everyone does manage, though, to abandon their projects for one evening, right before they go their separate ways, to exchange gifts. Caroline enchants glittery snowflakes to float around Alaric’s history classroom, Elena makes Jenna’s spiced cider recipe in a banged-up cauldron, and Bonnie sneaks in bags and bags of sweets from Honeydukes. The boys return in prideful glory from their secret mission to chop down a tree, which they shrunk down to pocket-size so they could smuggle it into the castle. They don’t sing any carols, since earlier in the week Stefan had to hold Caroline back from hexing two separate groups of carol singers who had the audacity to practice a little too near the library, and they don’t have the usual four-on-four girls-versus-boys quidditch game in the snow, because Tyler sprained his wrist slipping on ice in the courtyard and is under very strict instructions to let the healing potion do its work before he reinjures himself. But they eat and drink and make generally merry, and soak up each other’s company before the separation. 

“I can’t believe you’re not going home,” Bonnie tells Elena. They’re sitting opposite each other with their feet up on the same desk, floating a snowflake back and forth with their wands.

Elena makes a face. “Jeremy’s bringing Anna home.”

“Too much mistletoe kissing?” Bonnie says sympathetically.

“I can _hear_ you,” Jeremy calls from the across the room where he’s haggling over chocolate frog cards with Matt.

“ _And_ Alaric’s going to be staying with us,” Elena says. “Two couples: I’d just be a fifth wheel. Besides, they like to have one or two prefects left in the castle to keep an eye on everyone. One of the Ravenclaw seventh-years is staying, too.” 

“How many students in your tower?” Bonnie asks.

“Just me, and a second-year.”

“That’s grim,” Tyler puts in.

“No it’s not,” Elena says. “Read between the lines: just me, and a second-year, and _no Aimee Bradley_. And a happy Christmas to me.”

“Are you sure?” Caroline says. “You could always come home with Stefan and me. My mom won’t mind, she likes you.”

“Or I could try again to convince Gran to stay here, too,” Bonnie offers. “My muggle family doesn’t really know what to do with us, anyway.”

“No, it’s okay,” Elena assures them. “I’m sure. I’m kinda looking forward to the quiet.”

“No stressing,” Caroline says, pointing threateningly at her with her wand. “It’s Christmas, you can’t be stressed.”

“No,” Elena agrees, “I will pick my stress back up when the school year restarts.”

And for the most part, she manages to stay true to her word. She doesn’t force herself to mingle with the other students left behind, but keeps to herself, following her own whims. She sleeps late, and when she does get up she spends hours in her dressing gown. She unlocks the library, comes out with a stack of novels, and sits in an armchair by the common room fireplace and reads one after the other. She periodically receives letters or magically appearing notes from her friends to which she replies with assurances of her being perfectly fine, but mostly lets the outside world go on without her interference. The days pass without her giving much thought to anything other than the weather and what there’ll be for supper in the Great Hall.

Not that she’s been eating in the Great Hall – with less than a dozen students in the castle it feels particularly cold and un-homey. Rather, she’s been grabbing what food she can carry, and then slipping away to eat it somewhere no one will bother her. Today she has a meat pasty and a sizable chunk of cheese wrapped in a cloth napkin in one hand, a mug of soup in the other hand, and a whole pomegranate in her pocket. All her focus is on not leaving a trail of crumbs when she turns a corner in the hall and nearly runs straight into Damon.

They both take a step back – Elena in barely disguised alarm, Damon with a put-upon sigh. He asks, “Shouldn’t you be home?”

“Shouldn’t you?” 

He makes a face, and abruptly she remembers that for the last four years he’s been just as rootless as Stefan has – more so, because Stefan had Hogwarts, and Damon had nothing. Of course he’s here, of course his arms are half-full with smuggled food just like hers are, of course his Christmas will be solitary. “No,” he says flatly, “sorry, of course I should have known you’d need the whole castle to yourself.”

“Damon,” she says, quickly, “I’m sorry.”

He scoffs. “No need to be sorry. You got what you needed from me, I understand.”

“No, that’s not it at all.” 

“So you _didn’t_ get what you needed from me?”

“Damon,” Elena says, frustrated.

“I’m sorry, what can I offer you? My knowledge of the castle? The risk of my own long overdue expulsion? Hours and hours of research?”

“ _Damon_!” she snaps. He shuts his mouth, and glares at her mulishly. She takes a deep breath – she hoped that this would be easy; she got so used to his quietly helping her without asking any questions. But no, of course he’s angry with her. He has every right to be. She says, softly, “It’s Christmas Eve.”

He’s unimpressed. “And?” 

“And…” She wracks her brain, but there’s nothing she can say that will explain everything, let alone fix it. What comes out, all in a rush, is, “Do you want to hang out?”

His cold demeanor falters, his perplexity just slightly breaking through the walls he’s put up. “…hang out.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s Christmas Eve,” Damon repeats, “and you want…to _hang out_ …with me?”

“Yes, I do.”

He stares at her. “Well,” he says finally, “the owlery’s out, I’m sure people are up there checking to see if their presents have arrived.”

“There’s like, twelve people in the castle, Damon,” Elena says. “And I did say I’m not afraid to be seen with you.”

“You said you don’t want to be seen breaking rules with me.”

“It’s not breaking rules to spend time together.”

“Spend time, hang out,” he says, with an inexplicable air of derision. “So, you’re saying you want to sit in the Great Hall?”

“No,” she says, automatically. He raises his eyebrows. She holds up her supper as evidence, and says, “It’s got nothing to do with you, I wasn’t going to sit in there anyway, it’s cold.”

“Likely story,” he says, but he’s nearly smiling.

“Why don’t you just come up to my common room?” she suggests. She reads hesitation in his face, and presses on, “Come on, Bonnie and Caroline and Matt have all been in for parties and stuff.” 

He gives her a searching, skeptical look, then says, “Should I get more biscuits?”

“Um,” she stammers, not having expected such an easy surrender, “yeah, okay.”

He nods. “I’ll loop back and meet you at the bottom of the tower?”

She answers with a decisive nod of her own, and they maneuver around each other in the hallway and take off in opposite directions. The hallways are empty; her footsteps echo, she can all but hear the unsteady, pounding beat of her heart. The movement of the staircases is sluggish, but still reminds her of breathless moments, unseen in the middle of the bustle of everyday. 

When Damon appears on the landing, she says, as businesslike as she can, “Okay, just – I know it’s hard for you, but try to look friendly and innocent?”

“What, are you saying I’m not friendly?”

“I’m saying there aren’t enough students around to hide you in a crowd of Gryffindors, so I have to convince the Fat Lady to let you in.”

“And you think you’re up for that?”

She flips her hair. “What’s the point in being a goody-two-shoes if you don’t occasionally leverage that reputation to your advantage?”

It earns her the quick flash of a grin and, together, they climb the stairs. The Fat Lady immediately fixes Damon with a dirty look; Elena elbows him and he straightens from a slouch and pastes a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth expression on his face. It looks incongruous. Elena clears her throat. “Do you mind if my friend comes in for some Christmas Eve supper?”

“He’s with you?” 

“Yes.”

“Well, you know how things work,” the Fat Lady says, skeptically. “We go by password, not by house affiliation. If you want to bring him in, you just have to be willing to face the consequences if he breaks any rules.”

“He won’t,” Elena says, leaving unsaid the fact that if he won’t break rules, it’s because there’s no Stefan or Aimee for him to pick a fight with. “Snidget on a mooncalf.”

The portrait swings open, and Damon slips a hand under her elbow to help her through. 

“And Miss Gilbert?” 

Elena turns back.

“Since it’s only you and the Howard boy,” the Fat Lady says, sounding a bit embarrassed, “I was thinking of going to join Violet for a nice cup of tea. Some of her neighbors are having a bit of a sing-song.” Elena raises her eyebrows politely, and the portrait goes on, defensively, “It shouldn’t be any trouble, so long as you don’t leave and need to be let back in again. But there’s not really anywhere to go, is there?”

Elena nods, suppressing a smile. “I’ll be sure to tell Howard.”

When they’re both inside, and the portrait has swung shut again, Damon asks, “Did she just blackmail you?”

Elena shrugs. “Maybe a bit. I can live with that.” He snorts. She turns, and finds Cameron Howard seated in the big armchair by the fireplace, and waves at him. “The Fat Lady said to tell you that she’s stepping out for a little while this evening, so if you want anything from the Great Hall or the kitchens, you should probably get it now before she leaves so you can get back in.”

“I’m fine,” Cameron says; he shuts the book he was reading and slips it not-particularly-subtly into the middle of a pile of others. 

Elena resists the urge to roll her eyes; with all the secret extracurricular projects, it’s a wonder anyone in the castle ever gets any assigned reading done. She crosses into the middle of the room and places the food she’s carrying onto one of the low tables. “This is Damon.”

Cameron nods, and picks up his books.

“We’re not kicking you out,” Elena assures him. “We’re just going to eat supper.”

Cameron raises both eyebrows, clearly communicating that whatever she’s doing could not matter any less in his twelve-year-old world, and with that, takes himself and his armful of age-inappropriate books back up to the boys’ dormitory. Elena looks back at Damon, all too aware of the emptiness of the room, and the worrying fact that they have no project for them to focus on, and the awkwardness that comes of not having spoken for weeks. She’s seeing the common room through his eyes, worrying about the worn, fraying bunting that’s been passed down year after year, and the Christmas tree which mainly hosts everyone’s various quidditch-themed ornaments, carefully divided up so that opposing teams’ colors aren’t mixed. There’s probably even mistletoe somewhere, hung up by some hopeful fifth-year girl who’s deluded about fifth-year boys’ commitment to abiding by the rules of such holiday traditions. It’s all garish and sentimental and so very Gryffindor, and she wonders briefly what possessed her to invite Damon here. 

Damon jerks his head after Cameron, and says, “He seems like a treat.”

Elena gives a weak, relieved laugh. “He doesn’t much like anyone.”

“Oh, but it seems so much more likely that he has a very specific hateful grudge against you.”

“But everybody loves me.”

Damon looks like he might smile, and then rolls his eyes instead.

Elena wraps her arms around herself, and says, “I am sorry, Damon.”

“Yeah?” he says, almost but not quite lightly.

“Yes.” She takes a tentative step towards him. “I know I disappeared, and I’m not going to say it was an accident or something, but it wasn’t a plan. I just panicked, and then I didn’t know what to do to fix it.”

Damon walks past her, his shoulder just barely brushing hers, and leans down to add his contributions to their meal on the table; Elena waits, breath held. After a perilous moment, he turns back to her and says in a low voice, “It’s probably my fault.”

“What? No.”

“It wasn’t the right time for me to put that on you,” he says. “You had enough to worry about already, it was selfish of me, and I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t,” she says, reaching out on impulse to rest her hand on his arm; he stills, and, self-conscious, she takes her hand back. “It wasn’t,” she repeats firmly. “I’m glad you told me.”

“Why?” 

She shrugs. “I think maybe, if we look at this in retrospect, we both went into this thing with a lot of secrets.” She takes a breath, forces herself to look up and meet Damon’s eyes. "And I don’t want us to have any anymore.”

He tilts his head at her. “Don’t you think I’ll get boring without all that mystery?”

She can’t help it, she smiles. “No.”

For a split second they’re frozen just within reach of one another, then Damon reaches up to brush her hair away from her face, his knuckles just barely caressing her cheek. His mouth quirks, and Elena feels her heart beating hard in her chest and wonders if this was what Bonnie and Caroline were talking about, because it feels like she’s on a precipice. If Damon leans forward and kisses her it won’t be like kissing just another boy, it won’t be the beginning of a new school relationship, it will be something else entirely, something she’s never imagined let alone experienced. She’ll have entered a new stage of life. If Damon leans forward and kisses her, there won’t be any going back. 

And then he steps back. “Shall we?”

She blinks, and then remembers their improvised picnic. “Um, yes.”

They sit on the floor with the table coming up just below their chins, and divide their spoils. The pasty and the cheese they break in half, and the soup they pass back and forth; Damon purloined a hot baked potato wrapped in a napkin for each of them, a dish of butter, as well as an orange and entire tin’s worth of biscuits. It’s a strange mish-mosh of a Christmas Eve supper, but the food is good, and still hot even without any magical intervention. 

“Here, toss that over here,” he says when they’ve eaten their way through the main portion of their stash. “I know a spell for de-seeding it.”

“This?” Elena says, picking up the pomegranate and waving it at him. He nods. “No, thanks, I’ll do it by hand.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, seriously.”

“Why, when it’s going to take you twenty times longer?”

“I don’t mind.”

“What if _I_ mind?”

“I like doing it, Damon, and you’re not going to talk me out of it.”

He groans. “What’s there to like? It’s mindless and repetitive and there’s a thousand better ways to do it.”

“A thousand?”

“Okay, well, maybe not, but there’s one.”

Elena rolls her eyes, and looks down at the pomegranate, turning it absently in her hands. “My dad was brilliant in the kitchen,” she says, suddenly, “I mean, really. He could have a dozen spells working all at the same time and be working on something by hand and everything would turn out perfect, but my mom –” She looks up at Damon. He’s watching her steadily, and he smiles, encouraging. “She couldn’t cook anything. Her domestic spells would all go wrong, they’d be overmixed or undercooked or tepid or burnt, and if she didn’t use a spell she’d turn the whole kitchen into a disaster zone and it’d all turn out inedible anyway, no matter what it was.”

“Eggs?” Damon says. “Pasta?”

“ _Everything_ ,” Elena answers vehemently. “So every year on Christmas, Dad would roast the bird, and make the pudding and whatever else we were having – and Mom would de-seed a pomegranate.” She ducks her head, and laughs. “It would take most of the morning, and she’d be stained pink from her hands to her elbows, but that was her contribution to the Christmas dinner, and she did it.” 

Damon nods solemnly. “And do you take after your father or your mother?”

She chuckles. “Oh, my mother, definitely.” She takes her wand from her sleeve and carefully casts a severing charm to split the fruit in half, then adds little cuts around the sections and summons a decorative bowl from across the room when she starts losing seeds to the floor.

Damon groans again, but drags himself across the floor and starts adding wood to the fireplace while Elena painstakingly separates the shockingly red fruit from the white membrane. She’s always enjoyed the repetitive simplicity of the task, and now she’s especially glad to have something to do with her hands, which feel restless and untrustworthy. When a minute later Damon opens his mouth to complain, she throws a section of rind at him and he vanishes it mid-air, which then turns into something of a game. The silence from earlier never returns for long, but they don’t mention Katherine, or doppelgangers – Elena is conscious of his accusation that she used him, and is desperate to prove that she can spend time with him without enlisting his help for something, and Damon probably doesn’t want to bring up the topic which to all appearances drove her away. So Damon complains about the fourth-year student he’s sharing the Hufflepuff dormitories with over the holiday; Elena recites soppy things Jeremy has said about Anna which convinced her she couldn’t possibly spend the holiday with them. It’s like no other Christmas she’s ever had, like no Christmas she’s ever imagined, but somehow not un-festive. She trades handfuls of pomegranate seeds for sections of the orange Damon peeled with one flick of his wand, and then they take turns picking biscuits out of Damon’s stash once the fruit is gone, and the simple companionability is slightly reminiscent of the childhood ceremony of gift-giving. But here, with him, the reminder of what the old wonder felt like doesn’t come with the bitterly nostalgic longing for all that she’s lost close behind it; it’s only sweet.

“Do you know what would make this perfect?” Damon says. He’s stretched out on the ground, propped up on one elbow, chewing on a shortbread that he snatched before she could choose it.

“What?”

“If we had tea. But we can’t go get any without getting locked out, because of your unreliable absentee door guardian.”

“I have tea things in my room.”

“What, you mean a kettle and a pot and everything?”

“Of course,” she says comfortably. “We’re very civilized here.”

His brow furrows. “Are you _supposed_ to have them?”

“What are you, head boy?”

He raises his eyebrows.

“What would be _more_ uncivilized, not having a teakettle, or breaking a few rules?” He chuckles, and she grins. “I’ll just run upstairs and fetch everything. I don’t have any milk, I hope that’s okay?”

“I guess I’ll survive.”

She takes the stairs two at a time, lights a few candles with a flick of her wand, then pulls her robes over her head as she winds her way between the beds. She drops them in her laundry basket, and opens her wardrobe to dig for her tea set and also for a lighter set of robes more suited to sitting directly by the fire which Damon has built to “roaring” status. She finds her teapot carefully put away in its box, but her teacups are wrapped in various scarves lying on the bottom of the wardrobe, and she’s afraid to summon them in case they hit something on the way out and shatter. She’s on her knees carefully sifting through the piles when she hears the tell-tale creak of the floorboard near the door and looks up. “How’d you get in here?”

“Wondered if you needed a hand,” Damon answers, smoothly taking out of her hands the one teacup she’s managed to rescue.

“Thanks,” she answers wryly, “but not what I asked. The anti-fraternization spells should have spat you back down the stairs as soon as you set foot on them.”

“What, the powers-that-be don’t want me walking in on unsuspecting young women in their underclothes?” 

She’s in a tank top and leggings, which is hardly lingerie, but she resists the temptation to cross her arms defensively over her chest anyway. Instead, she leans back into the wardrobe to extract another crumpled scarf. “Focus, Damon.”

“Oh, believe me, I am.”

She reaches behind her to snap her fingers at him. “Focus on answering my question, please?”

“How I got in here?”

“Yes.”

“There is an explanation for that.”

“And?”

“And I should probably say first that it’s possible I haven’t been entirely up front with you.”

Elena sits back on her heels and looks up at him. “You’re kidding, right?” 

“Afraid not.”

“Really? More secrets?”

“Just the one. And in my defense, it’s not exactly my own personal secret, and I have been specifically warned not to tell you, so it’s a pretty impressive gesture of trust that I’m talking to you about it at all.”

“Or a demonstration that you can’t be trusted with other people’s secrets.”

He shrugs. “Or that.”

“Well,” Elena says weakly, “I guess you’d better tell me.”

He nods, and announces: “I didn’t come back to Hogwarts just to finish my education.”

She lets out a laugh. “Yeah, and?”

“You don’t seem surprised.”

“Well, given exactly how much time you spend in class, which is no time at all, it’s a pretty natural conclusion, Damon!”

“Look at you. Queen of deduction.”

Elena laughs again, more out of relief than anything else, and ducks back into the wardrobe for a black wool scarf with a likely-looking lump in it. “So?” she says, teasing. “What is it that brought you here? I promise not to tell Stefan so you can keep holding it over his head, since I know that’s your primary source of amusement.”

“Very kind of you,” he answers, drily. She glances backward and waves him on, and he sighs. “Long story short, the school asked me to come help with some curse-breaking research.”

“There’s a curse at Hogwarts?”

He snorts. “Are you kidding me? This castle has more curses in it than most dark spellbooks. But the one they called me for isn’t here. It’s tied up with a prophecy. Pretty dark stuff. Nobody’s quite sure if it refers to a curse that’s going to be cast soon, or if it’s already out there and it’s going to be broken soon.”

“So what’d they call you for?”

“I happen to be something of an expert,” he says, faintly offended. She turns around and places another teacup in his hand, and raises her eyebrows. He admits, “Okay, so maybe it was Rick who called me, and maybe he wasn’t completely aware at the time of my checkered past with this fine institution of learning.”

“Uh huh. How’d you two meet?”

“In a bar.”

Elena laughs. “So what does he have you doing?”

“Research, mostly,” Damon says with a groan. “And setting up some extra wards around the castle, taking some night shifts walking the grounds, just in case the situation blows up faster than we’re anticipating and comes home to roost at good old Warts of Hog, because historically speaking, when doesn’t it?” He pulls a wry face, says, “I have to be able to get around to do my research and set up my spells, hence,” he gestures around her bedroom, “I have pretty much the same all-access-pass as a professor.”

Elena considers this. “Does Carlotta know about it?”

“No, Carlotta and I have an old deal from my school days,” he answers. “She doesn’t tell on me for using the passage she’s supposed to guard, and I come by once a week and read her the Sunday paper.”

“What, really?”

“There’s only so much reading material available when you’re a portrait,” he says reasonably, “even if you borrow from your neighbors. And she likes to stay up to date on current events.”

Elena presses her lips together in an attempt not to smile, and busies herself with unpacking her teapot, _aguamenti_ -ing it full and _caminus_ -ing it hot, and adding the tea leaves. After a moment, she says, “So you could have just walked right into the restricted section in broad daylight and grabbed me whatever books I wanted, huh?”

“Well, yeah,” he says, offering her a cocky grin. “But I figured it was a good skill for you to have. I won’t always be around you know.” 

“Yeah, Stefan was sure you’d have skipped town by now.” 

He snorts. “Where _does_ Stef stand on the issue of his older, more exciting, better-looking brother these days?”

“We don’t tend to discuss you.”

“Oh, come on, surely I’m the subtext of your every conversation. I know I’m all he thinks about, and I have a sneaking suspicion that you spend a fair number of your daylight hours and the entirety of your nights dreaming of me.”

Elena doesn’t choose to dignify this with an answer. “Do you take sugar?”

“No, thanks.”

“Did it give you any pause?”

“The question about sugar? Not much.”

“No, Damon. Coming back to Hogwarts, knowing that you’d be near Stefan again if you did.” 

“Did it give me _pause_? I don’t know, maybe.”

She looks up, and his face is drawn. “You don’t have to –” she starts, but he waves her off.

“No, it’s okay. I know Stefan would have you think I completely forgot his existence, but of course I thought about the fact that he was here. I thought about how long it had been since I’d seen him, not just in passing, not just to check in on him. How long it’d been since we were really brothers.”

“And?” she says, quietly.

“And,” he says, “I figured, why not? It won’t change anything, but why not take one last year at Hogwarts with Stefan, even if it can’t make up for the ones I missed.”

“Then why aren’t you talking to him?”

“I am talking to him!”

“No,” Elena says, patiently, “what you’re doing is antagonizing him.”

“But how could I not?” Damon says with a groan. “Look at him! He was put in Gryffindor the very _moment_ the sorting hat touched his perfect hair. He’s captain of the quidditch team, probably got perfect scores on all his OWLs, and I bet you anything that the only reason he wasn’t made prefect is because he’s too good-natured to ever make accusations of wrongdoing against anyone who isn’t me.” He hands her the teacups, and then walks unerringly over to her bed and sits on the end, letting himself flop backwards. “Let’s face it,” he says, flatly, his eyes shut, “his reputation as an all-around hero was always better off without being muddied by association with his Hufflepuff brother. And he certainly doesn’t need me now.”

Elena carefully raises herself from her knelt position and crosses the room to hover on the opposite side of the bed. “I don’t think that’s true.” Damon opens one eye, and accepts the proffered cup of tea and rests it on his chest. At his prompting eyebrow, she says, “I don’t think you ever stop needing your family. Sometimes you just learn how to go on without them, like learning how to do without a missing limb.” 

“You never wanted to be independent?” 

“Maybe I did. But that was before I knew what it would feel like.” Gingerly, she sits, and takes a sip of her tea, and says, “And if I know Stefan, I doubt that he enjoys it any more than I do.”

Damon says in equally neutral tones, “I guess I’ll take that under advisement.”

She nods. He levers himself into a sitting position and takes a sip of his own tea, then sets it to hover in the air and leans off the edge of the bed, coming back up with a book. He recovers his tea, and looks at the spine. “ _Theory of Magical Passivity and Spontaneity_.” He looks sideways at her, and asks, “Events?”

“Yeah.”

“You found anything?”

Elena sets her cup and saucer on the bedside table, and lies down. Looking fixedly at the ceiling, she says, “No.” 

There’s a pause. Damon’s cup and saucer float steadily over her and settle next to hers on the table, and Damon slowly lowers himself down beside her. “What are you going to do?” he asks.

She snorts. “Do you mean, am I going to go off and get myself bit and become a vampire?” 

“Hey, you wanna be vampires?” Damon says, like a challenge. “I’ll be a vampire. I think we’d make great vampires.”

“What, both of us?” 

“Yeah, we’d be like a team! You draw ‘em in, I take ‘em out.” 

“I think I’d be perfectly capable of taking ‘em out on my own.”

“Oh, no doubt,” Damon says, agreeably. “And we can’t forget lycanthropy, though if you ask me, it sounds messier. But I bet you’d be cute as a wolf, and then it’d only be a concern once a month. Just tell me the plan, and I’m with you all the way.”

She looks over at him, and can’t help but smile. She rolls onto her side so that she’s facing him, and says, firmly, quietly, “No.”

“No?”

“I’ll find some other way. I’ll figure something out.”

Damon shifts his weight, mirroring her, and under the weight of his gaze she has to blink and then duck her head. He’s a breath away; if she only stretches out a single finger, she could touch him. There’s an overwhelming feeling, a kind of third presence in the room that fills up the space between them, electrifying and magnetizing. Elena wonders if it’s Damon, if everyone feels this way around him – or if it’s her, if the consuming desire to be close to him is born from her own heart and belongs to her alone. And still, she’s frozen, as if the enormity of the new possibilities in front of her is at once beautifully attractive and absolutely petrifying, and as much as everything in her is singing to reach out and close the gap, she can’t, she can’t.

He says, softly, seriously, “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

She reaches out, and takes his hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My entire goal for the last few months has been to get this chapter ready to post today, because it mostly takes place on Christmas Eve, and because Christmas Eve is my birthday, and I like the hobbit tradition of giving gifts away on one's own birthday. I hope you all like it.
> 
> Chapter title from "A World Alone" by Lorde.
> 
> Merry Christmas all! See you in the new year.


End file.
